Some of these new companies are redefining the term "starting at the bottom".
I recall many moons ago when RMIT created the "Aviation Degree" and met a bunch of them at Benalla flying gliders. This was around the time when HECS fees were introduced and university chancellors were finding more inventive and lucrative ways of funding themselves. The small market of educating foreign students turned into a huge market of milking them. It was inevitable that as the big players developed this market then new players would emerge to pick up the crumbs, so it's unsurprising we now have these kinds of exploitative education institutions delivering some of the most incredibly stupid and useless degrees.
Unfortunately I never had rich parents to pay for my training, and I was not alone. Financial constraints were the primary reason for development delays and that reality was normally accepted in the aviation industry unless you went military, but even there exists a story of a young adult collecting supermarket shopping trolleys for funding his initial flight training and ended up flying F-18s. It was normal for an ab-initio to take over a year to get the basic flying ticket due to a money deficit rather than skill.
I started off on Warriors and Cessnas - these were the bottom of the pile for most of us, occasionally we'd have a crack at something more interesting through club contacts which was novel. Back then we all knew our planes, our engines, our steam gauges, and our aviation history, we also knew what crap we didn't want to be seen flying in.
Unfortunately the victims of SOAR are your typical victims of commercial exploitation that can occur in any industry - health, finance, property, retirement, etc, etc.
The golden rule is to always do your homework.