That strategy gives you better margins. It doesn't give you better revenue or profits. The biggest problem Tesla had as a fledgling car company was cash flow, and the solution to that is scale and sales. FSD can be converted to immediate revenue by just charging for it, which is more cash-flow efficient than running a centralized taxi service. They have announced they have a dedicated rideshare vehicle in the works, and it's likely something of that nature was always in the works.

You're not totally wrong here. However the same is true of computers - a computer "fleet" makes much more money than the profit on the components, but Intel is not out there operating AWS-style datacenters.

I think there's such a thing as "core competency". It's possible that Musk views Tesla's core competency as building vehicles and vehicle software, not running a logistics-heavy operation like a robot taxi fleet.