Well I share agreement on the following:
StingingVelvet - "very company exists to make money"
Darvond - "an IPO is the biggest mistake one can make"
Zrevnur - Provides some data. I'd like to know her/his opinion based on that
FallenHeroX1 - its whole post :)
VBProject - "TL;DR" (its whole post) :)

My point is without being an expert on GOG internals that we can speculate and build our own reason.
But what for? just to satisfy our egos?
I suggest we focus on ensuring GOG effectively and fully addresses our complains.
Posting a vague response 2 days later telling us obvious things like (textually):
1) "Thank you for bringing this topic to our attention" (Were you sleeping?)
2) "We’re looking into it and will be updating you in the coming weeks" (wow! that's comforting!)
3) "not satisfied with the released version, you can use your right to refund the game" (Nice, a discovery!)
4) "we will not tolerate review bombing and will be removing posts that do not follow our review guidelines"
By around 1PM EST I checked and my review was gone: I won't dramatize considering my review on purpose was not related to the game (I did not save the exact text) but was something like "22Sep2021: The day GOG betrayed the FREE-DRM" on both title and description. So you can make your own opinion and maybe agree with me the deletion was justified... good! and my purpose was exactly to identify when they would delete it.
Anyhow, moving to my point: Deleting reviews is the only effective thing to our eyes GOG did until this exact moment! (thanks to my own experiment I can testify that)
Under those circumstances: Should we theorize the reason behind the recent awful decisions, or do we invest the time to spread the voice about this situation to evidently -force them- to a real & effective actions towards solutions?
Just my thoughts.

While that's certainly the case with GOG and gaming, there are thousands of companies that exist for other reasons than making money.

Some companies exist simply to be a legal party in some context, governmental and communal companies exist to provide some services for the people, and so on.

Of course even those companies probably prefer to make profit whenever possible, and many of them do, but that's not why they exist in the first place.

I wouldn't be too surprised if there's some open source project out there somewhere, that has established a legal company simply to be able to control how their code is being used in commercial projects.

But when it comes to GOG, sure, I don't think it even needs to be discussed what is motivating the company to do what they are doing. The only point of discussion would be, would GOG be less profit-driven if they weren't a part of a stock traded parent company, and how would that affect GOG's decisions over different issues?

they shouldnt , they should make offer good products and services without a loss

But CDP has been a public company for like 20 years so how does that explain the "recent awful decisions"?

Also the stock is reasonably priced right now thanks to the Cyperpunk debacle. Wish I had bought it when I started using gog, though.

any company exist to make a profit and deliver a good service.
a game is just a product to give the buyer entertainment

Cyperpunk was a project to ambitious and they got to much arrogance in there capabilities
a deathly combination for any large tech company

anyway i think CDR is again kind of stable the stocks not have massive drawback and it looks like it's on the rise again (from may) -41% up to -33%

i do advise to be bearish at the moment there is a long time debate about leverage in the stock market and it's do for correction. one only have to type inflation or evergrande and will see the Market in flames

Exactly if someday Gog want's to be a DRM-agnostic store instead of one claiming to be DRM-free they will do it with a day 1 AAA release, not for a five year old game that was already given free multiple time.

I think the problem with Gog, or should I say for Gog, is the game themselves and also the very definition of that is DRM and what isn't. A lot of people on this forum consider that every time something is bad for a customer or game preservation perspective then it is by definition "DRM" which is not true, things are not black and white. Personally I hate game streaming and I think it's one of the worse thing that can happen to gaming... but if you want to be correct it is NOT DRM.

Before it was easy you had online activation, that was DRM, remove it and the game was DRM-free. Easy, binary.

But now more and more games add online feature, most of the time not because of "DRM" or even piracy protection, but simply because they think it will help help create a "community" around the game, that because of some ever changing online content it will increase the life span of the game, and as a result increase their sales.

And the problem is that it's "easy" to ask a dev to remove Denuvo, online activation, etc... it's a lot more complicated to ask a dev to remove / make optional the while social / community aspect because I am convinced that most of them genuinely don't consider that to be a DRM at all because technically it is not.

So in the end for Gog the choice end up being : not sell a 100+ hour game because there is a couple of online daily mission or sell it with the risk of "bending" the expectation of what some peoples consider being DRM-free.

For Hitman they probably simply under-estimate the online part or even the community reaction to it.

I agree for the most part, except this wasn't a mistake. I believe they knew what they were doing in the first place, this was no accident.

Seems more like the people making the decisions forgot what DRM-free actually means and aren't aware when the line is quite obviously crossed.
As if a lot of the old guard have been replaced with younger folk who clearly aren't as sensitised to or outright don't give a flying fuck about DRM-free.

I can give my opinion on a potential reason for the DRM creep:

The situation:

1) CDPR wants to go "online online online" with their future games and integrate "online online" into their existing ones. Presumably this will include microtransactions. This requires DRM.

2) One of the strategic goals for GOG is to support CDPR games. Presumably this is exactly this "online online" stuff with Galaxy.

3) GOG has/had its DRM free philosophy.

Those 3 points dont work together. So one has to yield. As CDPR is the cash cow and GOG is not point 3 is the weakest. So #3 has to go. The current DRM creep is for figuring out how big the user base resistance is and to erode it.

This plan/vision has the weakness that GOG is very small so CDPR games on Steam (etc) are not properly part of the plan unless they somehow bundle Galaxy there too or something. And only selling on GOG doesnt seem to work out well - see the failure to limit Thronebreaker(?) to GOG. So their push for more GOG market share may also be related to that.

More on this including links and quotes: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/boycotting_gog_2021/post2379

"according to wikipedia"
Dude get help. Go outside. Touch grass. Kick through the leaves. Fall into a pit. Get rejected by a girl. Steal a cart from the mall. Chug vodka from a sports bottle.

Corporations aren't people dude. They have a legal responsibility to maximize their profits for their shareholders. If the CEO's don't accomplish their goal, and are actively found to violate those requirements, they could be held legally responsible and sued into oblivion.
Except none of their recent games have even attempted that. So, as I've stated a multitude of times, you are engaging in fear mongering and hysteria.

Corporations ARE people -- literally, and legally -- and the entire point of their existence is the limitation of liability, which raises an interesting question: what happens when people are shielded from the consequences of their behavior?

This is based on evidence. For the too-lazy to check it in the link here I have added 3 images from https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2021/03/cd-projekt-group-strategy-update-1.pdf: Its made abundantly clear that a notable goal for CDPR games is "online online online".
On page 24 (3rd image) it directly says:

Well then the debate should be whether they should be considered that legally. The debate is not "should corporations try and make money above all else?" That is not a debate, it is factually the reason they exist, and their only goal. As said above if they waver from this goal, CEOs are replaced.