What's the point of paying a hefty sum of money for the right to destroy a product and a team neither or whom are in competition with you? Not the first time I see it happening

For some reason most companies never seem to realize that they will destroy their acquisitions. It's always kind of an afterthought. "Oh, right, we have to terrify the new customers and lay off the people who make the products work. Sam, take care of that, will you?"

Acquisitions tend to be done in a haze of dream-state thinking. Maybe that's part of it.

You're buying an established brand to augment yours, regardless of what that brand does. It's a sort of SEO.

In this case, though, I disagree that there was no competition. Ecosystems like Arduino are real threats to large incumbents in adjacent sectors. If all the tooling and products necessary to embedded development end up being easily accessible, expensive options like Qualcomm's become effectively commoditized. Qualcomm basically acted like Bill Gates buying Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net