I do not think that is the issue. The recent acquisitions from all these big tech companies did not have any "meaningful" user base to begin with.

I think your name alone carries significant weight in the industry and you have built a very large community.

If you even vibe code something with, you will get a stupid amount of money thrown at you and a contract that bounds your existing projects and the next 3-5 years to a particular company as project lead.

Here is a list of acquisitions Cloudflare made recently: https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/acquisitions/

Most of these companies did not have a half dozen paying customer or even a fully fleshed-out product before they were acquired.