the real money maker called player retention
I have certainly not held back with criticism towards the choices Bytro has made over the years but even I almost feel bad when I point out that you're wrong here, at least when applying this to the current business model that this game is being run on. Feels like throwing needless dirt on them when that's actually not what I want to do.
What I, without being cynical, do believe has happened, is that the game entering the mobile gaming market initially a few years ago has been a learning experience for Bytro. They learned that with enough exposure on that market, microtransactions are a literal money printer. Audiences on that market tend to be very young and not very picky - if the game is shoved in their faces, they will play it, and if the developers are crafty enough (and Bytro having over a decade of experience with this, are), they are easy to "guide" into microtransactions. It's not really about the game itself, it's about how many opportunities and incentives the game provides to click a "buy" button - there are many enormously crude examples of this, but Bytro also ate this lesson up.
Ever since then, the game has become less involved and "dumbed down" to keep these extremely casual audiences with very fleeting attention spans interested for the few weeks tops they'll play this game before they move on. It's not about providing a deep, complex experience to players who are looking for a serious strategy game anymore.
They are well aware that they're attracting audiences that aren't looking for the kind of commitment to a game that you'd need to even complete a single match here and they will tell you this with pride when they point out how well the company's numbers are doing like they're completely unaware of or uninterested in the fact that any public match sees >80% of players drop inactive within the first week. If they left a couple of bucks here along the way, Bytro will read that as a flaming endorsement of its product.
Player retention has become entirely superfluous to Bytro because it isn't their real money maker anymore. Quick-hitting microtransactions on a new player pay much, much better. For what it's worth, I'm sure it's a really good racket - external financial estimates on Bytro certainly suggest so. Yeah, player retention is hard to achieve, but Bytro freaking had it before. I played this game for eleven years for example. They abandoned this pursuit consciously, which is why you're seeing the sort of changes that you very aptly describe in your post. The business model is no longer a long-term strategy game that generates income because it's better than the competition at being a long-term strategy game. It is now quantity of quality.