Companies generally only make detailed plans a year ahead based on data from the prior year or two. Which works out most of the time and the times it doesn't you can't really do anything about like financial crisis and covid boost then normalization.

If you were buying in the stock market early and didn't sell (or held on to vested stock), you probably felt the same and wouldn't have predicted such a precipitous crash. It looks obvious now but if you said mid-2022 that 2023 growth is gonna be lower than even pre-covid you get funny looks. Then the unplanned growth strains support, customers are complaining, your competitors are doing well too and are going to keep R&D expense ratios, so you do the same to stop your product falling behind. Investors are high on the bubble, you can spend money with much less scrutiny