It’s simple.
Qantas and Virgin (like every airline in the world) had virtually ground to a halt during the worst aviation crisis the world has seen and are now ramping up operations, stimulating demand and getting aircraft and staff flying again, even if that means not necessarily making huge sums of money in the short term.
While Rex was the only airline in the world to make a profit on the back of massive government handouts and leveraged that position to take a massive gamble on what the Australian aviation landscape would look like post COVID by starting an entirely new jet operation.
Now that their expensive Jet operation gamble has failed spectacularly it’s a bit rich to blame the incumbents when their whole business model revolved around there not being a Virgin Australia to compete with 🙄