They've always floundered around trying to find something that stuck that could also have a path to profit.

Being around the edges of the tech orgs that went in early on Scala it often felt like the Scala ecosystem initially thrived (the likes of Twitter releasing genuine quality oss in particular) despite the lack-lustre job of Typsesafe / Lightbend to cement themselves at the center.

With play being given to the community, lagom being underwhelming and a bit of a catch-the-wave thing, it's only really Akka that endures on top of the core language, which isn't really a great showing after so long.

Not directly no. The last major contribution from Lightbend employees was the big collections rewrite in the standard library (shared by Scala 2.13 and 3.x). The Scala 3 compiler and core tooling is developed by the LAMP, the Scala Center, VirtusLab and a few other people. Lightbend is maintaining Scala 2 compilers (2.11, 2.12, 2.13).