As a company grows, its technology edge or problems often show up in the results. For instance, Google's used commodity hardware when it needed to scale search, allowing them to index more of the web, maintaining its edge, which brought more users. Twitter has had problems on product iteration. This potentially is due to its tech stack or execution, but either way it shows up in its results relative to Facebook.

There are cases where the early tech is valuable to an acquiring company. Apple's acquisition of FoundationDB comes to mind. A company could also be interested if say they needed a bunch of Go developers to rewrite their backend, and an acquihire deal made the most sense.