What about Ori, Minecraft dunegeons, age of empires, etc You are forgetting lots of games there. Also talks of acquisitions.
Ori and Age of Empires are modestly budgeted external projects and Minecraft Dungeons is a modestly budgeted internal project. You're sort of proving their point by using those as your examples.
So MS ramped up in spending hundreds of million (billions) in building out new hardware, talks of acquisitions, new game development, expansion of teams, new teams all just to go belly up and quit. nah I don't see it.
"Well documented history…nah, I don't see it!"
Consider that many within Microsoft might have been keen to
avoid the major expense of developing new hardware, given how the Xbox One panned out. Maybe it
wasn't a given that Microsoft would "ramp up in spending" to develop a new Xbox.
You mention "new teams" but by the midpoint of this generation Microsoft was cancelling games and
shutting down teams, including major teams like Lionhead.
You keep mentioning the "talks of acquisitions" but it's worth noting when those acquisitions occurred. Did they occur gradually, over the entire Xbox One era? Or did they announce a bunch of acquisitions all at once? Microsoft's "spending spree" marked a fairly clear turning point for the division, a point where Microsoft changed their strategy and re-committed themselves to staying in the race for the long haul. This is important, because by saying there
wasn't a period before that where Microsoft
had scaled back their willingness to invest in Xbox, you're essentially saying that this turning point didn't exist, which is amusing because it was so apparent to even casual observers of the company (and indeed "We've changed! next gen will be different!" is the unspoken subtext of their last few E3s).