There’s a big difference between nuking a very successful part of your business that generated a lot of goodwill and positive brand sentiment, and not doing any of that in the first place.
As
@Chuq stated, Tesla had to build the SC network as an integral part of their business, otherwise the whole would not have succeeded. Over time, it became entrenched as one of the key value-add reasons one bought a Tesla. Elon killing it off really is deranged behaviour.
A normal CEO, if they had an issue with one of their Executives apparently defying them, would just sack the executive concerned. A petulant response still, but vaguely defendable. But having a toddler tantrum and sacking that Executive and her entire division in order to make an “example” of them is absolutely not defendable. It’s totally unhinged behaviour.
Other companies never built their own charging networks, because they were conflicted about EVs from the start (trying to protect ICE revenues) and the EVs they did make lost money - so they never had the capital resources or appetite to increase their EV-related exposure.
For those companies, every dollar they spent on a charging network is a dollar they would have not spent on their EVs to make them better and grab more market share. I’d much rather them focus on that. Also, by the time most of them became reasonably serious about EVs, substantial third party charging networks were ramping up and reaching scale, making it far less necessary for them to start building their own.