i don't think it's a matter of negative attention, but rather the lack of attention towards smaller games and publishers from sony recently that's rankled some of those folks, and it has more to do with siea centralizing control within sie. siea has always had a weird bend towards presentation (2d games on psx, ports/remakes on ps2 needing to be collections - which helped kill working designs, and blocking games on ps3 because they didn't look good enough). i think this continues into the modern day where they just never really 'got' handhelds and especially hated the idea of failure. siea never really supported the vita in a strong way, and from what i understand people higher up inside the company seemed tired of its continued existence (though that's definitely more of a recent thing... in the last year and a half or so).
and look at the last five years - the ps3 kinda goes out with a whimper and ps4 localizations are hard to come by initially (partially because of the very late japan launch). all that's there is the ps vita, and it's doing well with its niche audience. and then sony announces it will drop first-party support, but third-parties are totally cool to keep making games for it...! it's a pretty shitty thing, but it's not all bad. there are people within sony who actually do care about those kinds of games and the vita (remember gio corsi at psx 2016 with his vita? seems kind of out of place within the presentation as a whole, almost improvised). it seems that whoever's up in charge and cares about presentation is all about vr right now, probably because they diverted resources to it and a lot of them, and this thing better actually start taking off!
what will always affect a company are the people working there. part of sony's western push is because of the people who were able to get into positions of power where they could create change. and there are definitely people within sony who care about the smaller guys and don't understand why the push for the biggest companies when they're guaranteed anyway. there's people there who understood that the switch actually represented a threat where smaller guys might be able to break away and grow into bigger smaller guys and create a bit of a snowball effect. it may be another 5-10 years before they're in positions of enough power that they can sway things in another direction though.
