Everyone is a competitor for venture capital & buyout offers.  The differing customer base of a food delivery startup & a spaceship startup is window dressing.

The 1st thing lions noticed after being sold dividend stonks was how the higher the dividend, the worse the stonk performed.  They were divesting value to pay the dividend.  Dividends for lions are a scam.  A stock that declines to pay a dividend is worth the same as a stock which rises by not paying a dividend.

Their mane use is getting cash from stonks without selling any shares.  Without a dividend, you would have to sell whole numbers of shares to get cash until all the shares were gone.  With a dividend, the position can be manetained while still getting cash.  If you don't need cash, there's no reason to collect a dividend.  The value should be automatically reinvested in the shares so it can "compound".

Of course, dividend cash can be used to buy a different stonk, but why not just buy the different stonk instead of the dividend yielding one.  

There might be a tax advantage to a company that pays dividends.  They can write off paying the dividend, instead of keeping it around in a valuation.

Dividend stonks were heavily promoted during the rotten years of 2000-2010, when the stonk market moved sideways & trades costed money.  Selling stonks to get cash involved a commission so it paid to have an automatic dividend.

Compounding with stocks is a relative term, though.  They don't compound like interest.  They just have a starting & ending price with no correlation between the amount of change & the share price.  It feels better to see a headline of 1% growth for a $1000 stonk than a $100 stonk, but the $1000 stonks tend to have smaller percentage movements & the cheaper stonks tend to see the kinds of gains affiliated with more expensive bonds.