This is definitely not the biggest reason. Their parent company, enthusiast gaming, is in the red by millions of dollars. Its probable that they wouldn't have gotten franchising anyway, but that's probably due to the lack of financial stability enthusiast and therefore LG have.

They got flamed for doing it despite the meta drastically shifting towards astra/viper and not adapting well to it. It's much different when its a period of 3 days versus 3 months