Edit: This question attracted way more interest than I hoped for! I will need some time to go through the comments in the next days, thanks for your efforts everyone. One thing I could grasp from the answers already - it seems to be complicated. There is no one fits all answer.
Under capitalism, it seems companies always need to grow bigger. Why can’t they just say, okay, we have 100 employees and produce a nice product for a specific market and that’s fine?
Or is this only a US megacorp thing where they need to grow to satisfy their shareholders?
Let’s ignore that most of the times the small companies get bought by the large ones.
Only that this swap economy, where people had to bring cows and tables to the market and trade those for 200 breads is a myth. That never existed. Modern anthropology says that trade was always measured in debt. Trade outside of your local community was handled via valuable ores, or other small valuable stuff.