Industry executives argue that SpaceX’s dominant position in the launch market is making it difficult for small launch vehicles to compete.
spacenews.com
Obviously a bit of posturing there to try and stir up sympathy for some gub'ment support, I suspect including a lifeline kind of equivalent to how the various state funded European entities are what keeps Vega flying. But...the bottom line is that most rocket startups (like most startups in general) were always destined to fail, independent of SX's competition.
Playing the broken record, there's still a bit of a customer supply problem too--there really
aren't that many entities that want to huck a lot of mass into space, so its not like the space industry has warehouses of things waiting for rockets to be built. Satellites that are both reliable and useful enough to base a credible business model are still relatively expensive (many $M's), and there's perpetual skepticism from The Deep Pockets in paying for that kind of thing (especially after The Year of the SPAC).
Yeah there's a number of entities biding their time with cuebsats (the significant majority of sats on Transporters) until they can raise enough to build something more useful, but there really aren't a lot of entities making a stable living off cuebsats. Planet is the darling of cubesat companies, but
most of their revenue comes from a) the Skysats they acquired through the Skybox-->Google-->Planet acquisition flow and b) the ACE engines they acquired through the Apollo Fusion-->Astra-->Planet acquisition flow. Spire has been around long enough (and has grown big enough) to not simply be dismissed, but they're still a far cry from returning whatever their investor decks have been predicting over the years.
[Commercial] Satellite operators going to non-SX launch providers (mostly Rocket Lab) is also notable data point that launch price isn't everything. Capella and BlackSky are some of the bigger/established names and they pretty much exclusively launch on Electron at this point. Being able to launch when you want and where you want is obviously worth a premium to folks running a credible business that needs a persistent fleet of "big" Smallsats (vs cubesats). Note: That's mean to contrast with the significant portion of the bigger Transporter satellites, which are one off, experimental, or proof of concept, all of which can trade sub-optimal launch timing or orbit to keep that pocket full of duckets.
Time will tell if the mid-inclination Bandwagon launches more or less obsolete Electron (and Firefly Alpha, which is pretty much the only credible small vehicle in the pipeline). Time will tell if Neutron obsoletes Electron anyway, as time and time again rockets prove to be an excellent example of economies of scale. Like I've also broken record-ed here, the business case for a small launcher is really
really fragile. When Rocket Lab has to build the same number engines for Electron that does for falcon and the majority of the cost is in the design an manufacturing (not the raw material) the opportunity for the small thing to win on cost is somewhat limited.