Adobe rightfully sees itself standing on the edge of a cliff. Adobe XD, despite having some great features, was handily clobbered in the market first by Sketch, and then by the vastly lighter-weight Figma. Beyond that, Figma has a great, intuitive, smooth interface for making vector graphics. It's not nearly as powerful as Illustrator, but easily does what most interface and web designers need, and that's probably a huge chunk of Illustrator's market rather than the more intensive digital artist users.

If they lose Illustrator, the ecosystem is a lot less valuable. Photoshop has significant competition from relative newcomers and print media, etc. made in InDesign is has much less gravity than it used to.

So rather than trying to make better and more innovative products in earnest, they're going to try to buy and suppress their competition just like Autodesk and so many other dinosaur graphics companies.