Well 2022 was a good year for smaller corps because the competition was lighter. HoloEN was at their weakest after the Sana graduation and the later half of the year had numerous "dead weeks" as the girls were overseas, giving other vtubers a chance to stand out during primetime hours. Meanwhile NijiEN looked to be seeing diminishing returns with their newer gens starting to fly under the radar even quicker and quicker.
Then out of nowhere, HoloEN had their first EN concert and debuted the long-awaited EN3, which seems to have shored up a lot of their fans that drifted away. Vshojo shed a lot of their whores and reinvented itself as a legitimate org that WILL poach your talents and give them what they want, as NijiEN has started to find out as they hemorrhage talents. Looking outside of the top league, this whole year has seen Phase establish themselves as the "big small corp" (or medium corp) that has proven to be stable with no signs of instability despite being labeled "the chaos corp". How quickly they were able to move on after the Yuri termination has shown how stable Phase is. Seeing HoloEN and Vshojo (and to a lesser extent Phase) all entrench themselves in the EN market and stabilize is actually VERY terrifying to everyone else trying to tap into the EN market.
Corps like Idol and Brave have tried to force their way into relevance in the market with deep pockets, which isn't too surprising as Sakana has even mentioned how Phase was in the red for a while. The problem is that their stability hasn't been established yet and even if their pockets appear to be endless, the patience of their investors is not, the bigger they get the more issues they will have.
