What happened was Barry McCarthy, who was CFO at Netflix till 2010, left Netflix. Barry was an exceedingly creative and forward thinking CFO. He was the CFO responsible for taking Spotify public via direct listing in 2018, which was an incredibly bold move at the time. Definitely creative as far as CFOs go.
Adobe used to do these designy annual reports as well [1], and it looks like they stopped in 2003. I wonder if something in that era encouraged them to knock it off.
Edit: for Adobe, it may have coincided with significantly cutting back their Marketing/Communications department, which had a huge staff of really great artists in the 90's. I believe this became viewed as an extravagance to have a stable of really talented and creative artists and designers on staff when you can hire this stuff out and get "reasonable" results.
What is impressive to me is, it still shows there is demand from accountants/investors and offer from authors for artistically pleasing documents.
It dwindled out, but it is similar to corporate websites like SAP which were boring to death and made life in corporate a bane (we should study suicide and boredom-from-boring-documents in corporates), until all layers of management were naturally attracted to software created by little startups, even if it didn’t track time correctly, but it was cuter and nicer and didn’t require IE7.
Boredom-from-documents-and-websites is a key factor for people’s choice of employment...
