You're making a really good insight here. I just wanna give some examples to add to your point. Here in Indonesia there are 2 big Uber clone (at least initially): Gojek and Grab that are both unicorn. In the beginning, they both started off ride-hailing. But after about 4 years, Gojek morphed into a payment company like Chinese We-Pay. It seems they were thinking of ride-hailing as a good customer-acquisition strategy in order to build the initial user base. On the other hand, Grab still seems to be focused on being a transport company, but they expand to a lot more countries. Their main strategy seems to be South East Asia expansion.

I think these are very cool examples on how two seemingly the same thing end up diverging and finding up their own path.