Is Shell buying charging stations to slow EV adoption?

I used to use a few charging stations owned by Greenlots. Shell bought Greenlots in 2019. About a year or two ago all three of these charging stations became non-operational. They still haven’t been repaired years later.

Shell bought Volta around the end of last year. They slowly transitioned the branding on the charging stations at my local mall and just switched everything over to the Shell app a month ago. Ever since then, 3 of the 4 chargers I used to regularly use are non-operational. I first reported the issue to Shell on 8/30/24. The last time I checked on Thursday, they were still not repaired.

I wonder if Shell is buying up charging stations without plans to maintain them. This could slow EV adoption, as EV users will complain to friends about the terrible reliability of public charging. Now their friends will be less likely to buy EVs and thus there will be more ICE vehicles on the road buying Shell gas for longer. Then if the EV charging stations become more profitable than selling gas, they can ramp up the maintenance on these stations later.

This may not be the case, as Volta and Greenlots weren’t fantastic at maintaining their stations. It may have taken them a week or two to repair a down charging station, but not months or years. Maybe Shell is focusing on maintaining L3 chargers over L2 chargers. Do other people have the same experience with L3 chargers? Maybe the free (add supported) charging at Volta stations and the low price ( < $0.30 per KWh) for charging at the old Greenlots stations provided no incentive for Shell to devote resources to get them back up and running. Maybe this is just another example of poor maintenance of non-Tesla EV charging stations that isn’t unique to Shell. It seems like the government and EV charging companies are focussed on building out the charging network, but not focussed enough on maintaining the existing network. However, I feel Shell is several times worse than Charge Point for L2 charging.