It appears that the flagship route didn’t work out for them (I rode my Nokia 8 for as long as I could, but the storage was giving me problems.)
Much like when Motorola went into zombie brand mode (after being sold to Lenovo) they leaned hard on the midrange which appeared to do ok, as well as their feature phones.
Google giving up on KaiOS was probably the other killer, money had to go into redeveloping their feature phone software.