I think their strategy is to commoditize the Next.js and Gatsby differentiation; They host all JAM-stacks pretty equally. The add a lot of paid dynamic add-ons that are hard to do statically (and that they told you were BAD_THINGS at the start) like form processing and user management.
I think their model is more realistic as a superset of what Gatsby can offer, but I'm not convinced it justifies 100 million dollars of VC investment. BUT - I'm always off by a factor of 4x (projected costs, effort estimates) so if you think it's worth 25 million, then you should go for it!
I like Netlify but I suspect it's much easier for Gatsby and Next to add Netlify-like functionality to their offerings than the reverse. I suspect one is unlikely to need both (Gatsby SaaS or Next SaaS) and (Netlify SaaS), which doesn't bode well for Netlify.
I think their model is more realistic as a superset of what Gatsby can offer, but I'm not convinced it justifies 100 million dollars of VC investment. BUT - I'm always off by a factor of 4x (projected costs, effort estimates) so if you think it's worth 25 million, then you should go for it!