It's all a symptom of Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) becoming the primary revenue metric for many SaaS companies. It's a simple metric that provides a good foundation for forecasting future revenues, so it keeps shareholders happy when a company can explain how much ARR they have and how much they expect it to grow / decline.
Like you said, companies don't need to do anything except protect their ARR with a bit of lipgloss and it also leads to the company shaving off any other parts of their business that are not contributing to that ARR metric.