If people believe there's room for growth, then earning profit implies you're wasting money. The money kept as profit could have been spent on growth. Money spent on growth is not included in profits.

To put it another way...

If you have a factory and produce 10,000 widgets that cost $10 to make and you sell them all for $100 each, then you've made $900,000. But if you spend all $900,000 on factory expansion because you know there's a demand for at least 1 million widgets, then you've made $0 in profit.

These numbers cause constant bickering when it comes to stocks. When people were talking about Amazon not being profitable, it's really because all the money they made was being re-invested back into the company.

People make noise about Tesla not being profitable, claiming it's stock is extremely overvalued. Well, if they completely eliminated R&D, stopped trying to improve batteries, automation, self-driving capabilities, etc., they'd probably be quite profitable.

Hence why people claim you shouldn't be declaring profits if there's still growth potential. If you're a publicly traded company, yeah your finances are declared publicly, but in this case, "declaring profits" means that your financial reports should be showing very little profit. If you're showing profit, it means growth is being limited.