It happens because the work chased what was easy to move. Ranking first for your own business name isn’t a result — those people already knew you. Ranking for a term with forty monthly searches and no buying intent isn’t either.
The worse version: months of content produced while the technical foundation stays broken. Pages not indexed. Duplicate URLs competing. A structure Google can’t follow. No amount of content fixes a site that can’t be crawled.
The only question worth asking is whether more of the right people are contacting you.