If Stripe want to sacrifice customer experience to chase a higher valuation that's their prerogative. But their current investors better hope they can cut and run before the core business substantially declines.
which is about where we're at, so
Your description is exactly how Capitalism goes late stage. Use the profits from the committed work and effort of employees to "buy back" stocks, depriving the company of reinvestments and growth. Jack up the share price, therefore increasing the lauded "shareholder value". Keep going until only a husk of the company is left, and peace out with walkaway money.
This is all great, for those with platinum parachutes and those that know what's going on. These are vulture capitalists, but they infiltrate a company first and then eat away at it from the inside.
This is how America lost GE and Boeing. They served "ownership" very well however.
The real client is the VC who writes cheques and provides validation in increasing valuations. The "regular clients" are a raw material, to be converted into the service provided to VC.
Clearly, in the early days, you desperately need "regular clients" to prove yourself to the "VC clients". But eventually you earned your stripes and you can again care about valuation over revenue and profit, and consequently customer retention.
Add to it the SV dream of inventing a niche and monopolising it, and you care about your customers less still.