People do?

Purism were doing well enough before they took on this smartphone project. But they're not a big company and they probably do not have any sort of financial cushioning, which became apparent during the Librem 5 desaster, because many decisions were clearly made to - how to put it - not go bankrupt, try to keep the money in, hoping it would work out in the end.
The problem is that they weren't being upfront about it, choosing a (probably expensive) marketing "strategy" instead, while the actual hard/software development remained pitiful (there's some pics & vids in this thread that well deserve this adjective, and articles that go into much detail).