Nah, they dug their own grave:
- New hires at the studio made to get Days Gone out the door didn't want to continue to work with creative director (and sole writer!) John Garvin because of his temperament.
- Bend management shows him the door the very week Days Gone comes out.
- Following Garvin's exit, they go for a flat management structure, with no hierarchy in place. This makes it so that people who, for instance, don't understand shit about game design such as your newly-hired Hollywood writers or an art director suddenly begin to meddle with the vision for Days Gone 2.
- A project that a sizeable amount of people at the studio, including management, didn't seem interested in pursuing at all, in spite of then-WWS president Shawn Layden being all in on the franchise.
- Eventually, studio management has declined Days Gone 2 it's first greenlight for so long, refusing to take it to, say, Scott Rohde, Connie Booth or any other WWS executive along those lines, that it becomes clear that the game was not going to happen.
- On top of it, management's plan to bring in Hollywood writers had failed, since their vision clashed with that of Days Gone game director Jeff Ross, who still remained at the studio at the time, fighting to get the sequel - and eventually even an open-world Resistance game - off the ground.
- Without a project and without the narrative staff to get any new singleplayer, story-based game going on their own, the newly-appointed head of WWS Hermen Hulst makes the call to have Bend partner with creative leads from Naughty Dog, who would provide the creative direction and writing for the project, on an Uncharted spin-off game starring Sully.
- Bend game director Jeff Ross, who had already collaborated with Naughty Dog on Uncharted: Golden Abyss, gladly takes on the task and so a collaboration begins and, in order to keep as much as Bend's workforce employed while the Uncharted game navigates pre-production, the studio is called in to go lend Naughty Dog a hand in establishing the foundations for the open-world San Francisco in which The Last Of Us Online was planned to take place.
- Unsurprisingly, folks at Bend's trenches once again show their dissatisfaction with having, in their eyes, become a "Naughty Dog support studio" and eventually studio management asks PlayStation Studios executives if they could be taken off the Uncharted project and instead given the chance to pursue an original game of their own, not Days Gone, not Uncharted, but a new IP.
- With no writers at the studio, this meant that the new IP would inherently have to be multiplayer-focused, a live-service game. Having had enough of this bullshit already, with morons at the trenches having killed two projects already, Jeff Ross departs the studio in late 2020.
If anything, Sony gave Bend's management too much rope, too much freedom -- which shows the level of confidence and autonomy that Sony gives their first-party teams. With Monday's newspaper, it is clear that perhaps what, in other context, could've been seen as a drastic and aggressive meassure -- to intervene the studio and force them to work on game X, be it Days Gone or Uncharted -- would've been the right call to make at the time.