As a former enterprise person, this clearly states “exiting growth cycle into low-staffing maintenance mode”; Salesforce must have bought them to kill a price-beating competitor to multi-year Salesforce PaaS contracts, same as Okta did with Auth0. Investors are typically-majority short-sighted and only care about growth-cycle revenue, so once they reached market saturation, they were ripe and duly reaped. So long, Heroku.
Absolutely none of this is true. What was the PaaS Heroku was apparently beating at the time of the acquisition?
You are saying the plan was to buy a "price-beating competitor", invest in them for 16 years, and then finally pull the rug out now?