What is happening with Ubuntu is what happens when the top executives realize that it may be more profitable to mothball their companies' developments and sellout to the main competition rather than compete with them.
With Canonical and Redhat virtually in bed with Microsoft does any one seriously think that Canonical was going to proceed on a path that would mean getting into head on competition with a major company they had decided to collaborate with?
When Ubuntu collaborates with Microsoft on Bash/WSL what do you think is going to happen? When hardware vendors don't want to open up their drivers for Linux to compete effectively with Windows and Mac how much progress can Ubuntu make with their phones?
The Linux desktop is supposed to be a power users desktop but their poor vision of its developers failed it. It is supposed to be the equivalent of an advanced Smalltalk or Lisp workstation where its administration is concerned, to managed by messaging passing scripting languages like Smalltalk, Lisp or similar. The fact that it is still managed by tedious error prone scripts and configuration files only shows how poor the whole design has been. Coming to think of Linux is just the kernel, and none of the desktop developers had the smarts to develop a sound administration language and build the desktop proper on top of it. All that has happened is that it has given Microsoft and the other big guys the breathing space to retrench and now they have carved up the market by basically co-opting Redhat and Canonical into their camp.
Frankly Canonical has no future, and you can expect it to be absorbed by Redhat at some point in the future given that Redhat controls the Debian project which is the foundation on which Ubuntu itself is built. The only reason why Microsoft would not absorb Canonical itself is to give the impression of competition.
So in effect Ubuntu has turned into the goto desktop for Linux administrators, while Microsoft deepens and extends its reach by making Windows the goto tool for developing cross platform applications.