

It’s mixed with other artificial sweeteners (I know of at least the monk fruit in my pantry) to get better weight to sweetness ratios. Most of the most popular artificial sweeteners are far stronger, sometimes hundreds of times stronger, than sugar. So they mix them with erythritol, which is less sweet than sugar, so you can replace 5g of sugar with 5g of the artificial sweetener in recipes and get the right sweetness.
The thing is it’s been like that forever. Good products made by small- to medium-sized businesses have always attracted buyouts where the new owner basically converts the good reputation of the original into money through cutting corners, laying off critical workers, and other strategies that slowly (or quickly) make the product worse. Eventually the formerly good product gets bad enough there’s space in the market for an entrepreneur to introduce a new good product, and the cycle repeats.
I think what’s different now is, since this has gone on unabated for 70+ years, economic inequality means the people with good ideas for products can’t afford to become entrepreneurs anymore. The market openings are there, but the people that made everything so bad now have all the money. So the cycle is broken not by good products staying good, but by bad products having no replacements.