Honestly, Apple has a 'Mac habit' of introducing new product lines and not knowing what to do with them, which goes back to the early 1990s.
Historically, some of the blame can be attributed to Motorola/IBM/Intel and their own roadmaps, but this is clearly no longer the case. Apple's destiny is largely in its own hands... and the production line capacities.
The Studio was introduced because enough people asked for it - a Mac Pro without internal expansion. Great! But I believe Apple has designed itself into a corner almost unintentionally, by designing base-line chips that are now so capable.
Years ago it was always the case that you needed 'powerful' (non-consumer) hardware to achieve specific tasks, such as video rendering, audio production, coding, even graphic design to a certain extent. I remember the days of an iMac G3 crawling with just Photoshop!
But now, the M-series chips have reached a point with M4 that they will handle virtually everything you can throw at them within a reasonable amount of time or little compromise. We're doing things now like 4K video editing, ray-tracing, high-end music production, coding, hi-res photography and graphics art which years ago would have been unthinkable from a base-line chip. The new Mini is, for all intents and purposes, the Mac that Apple has always dreamt of.
So Apple's problem is that it has become more difficult to upsell customers, because the CPU and GPU requirements of many professional workflows have reached a point of tolerance; that is, you no longer need to get up and make a cup of coffee whilst you hear an aircraft taking off. The technology has been democratised to smaller, thinner, lower cost devices. Workflows of greater demand - 8K video/spatial, science, 3D - are a tiny market for Apple, and most are on Windows.
The Mac Pro is becoming more and more of a niche since internal expansion and modularity have become less of a necessity. Yes, it's still required for some workflows, but external solutions have improved in pricing, speed, and choice since the days of the trashcan Mac Pro, where this would more of a genuine concern. Apple made the mistake of replacing their tower rather than adding the trashcan to the line-up, and it was this single move (plus, poor software updates) that may have finished off many of Apple's most loyal pro-hardware customers.
The Studio fulfils the promise of the trashcan, albeit with a less ambitious aesthetic, and was released at the correct time. It takes Apple's most powerful hardware and puts it into a supremely compact form-factor, which is what people were asking for for years.
Yet there is a new problem, which is that because Apple want's the device to be available in both Max and Ultra configs, they have to wait for the Ultra to be released even if the Max is ready. This is a problem of their creation.
Where do they go from here? Typically, Apple just lets products linger until the figure out what the market wants, which is quite bone-headed as they don't adjust the pricing over time accordingly.
I'll take a bet that we'll see one last Mac Pro design before the tower is retired. Their priority is reducing costs, so the device would be shrunk down to 4-6 PCIE slots - perhaps one being double-height - and with a smaller power supply. The lattice 'honeycomb' ventilation, clearly a costly manufacturing process, would be replaced with the simpler cheese grater design as per the Mac Pro 5,1 (or the rear design of the Studio). It could literally be a smaller version of 5,1.
As for the Studio, it exists purely because the Mini is too small to cool a Max/Ultra chip, so I see it existing for the foreseeable future with a redesign soon to shrink it a little.
But in short, I don't believe Apple has any hate towards its professional users, I just feel that they've not been the priority due to a multitude of misreadings, including a lack of investment in the actual driver (their professional software), a lack of co-operation with outside parties who supply professional hardware and software, and the continued importance of growing Mac marketshare at the entry-level.
