During this, the GTAO team was making great progress on their work and seeing huge success so Rockstar decided to lend them more resources to build out GTAO which ultimately paid off hugely.
Isn’t that kind of the same thing? They got rid of the online-focused producer, and then allocated more resources to GTAO while hiring to backfill people who left. They could’ve prioritized GTA V DLCs or the other projects, but they didn’t.
Then those projects got cancelled because they didn’t have people allocated, so they didn’t make progress. They later allocated people to RDR2, but there was still that 2-year gap where they focused on GTAO.
So I’m going to interpret that as them getting cancelled in favor of GTAO. And then later in favor of a bigger RDR2, which I’m guessing consisted of Red Dead Online, which they neglected because it didn’t get the reception they hoped for.