I'm not familiar with this show, so I can't speak to its quality (I tried to watch some of it several years ago and quickly moved on).

But that aside... Of course Netflix is going to renew a dozen shows with tiny budgets before they renew a single show with a huge budget. That's not a cynical take it's just reality. The higher your budget, the better you have to perform. In Netflix HQ they were not deciding between keeping "Somebody Feed Phil" and "1899".

"1899" cost over $60 million. "Somebody Feed Phil" is 90% Phil's salary and I doubt the guy worth hundreds of millions is asking for all that much to be paid to eat and travel. Not to mention it was a show he ran on PBS originally, then went to pitch to Netflix after it got canceled. I doubt he is asking for much more than a PBS-sized salary. He is basically retired and enjoys this.