What is the point of that? No Cubs fans are going to be like "hey i'm just happy they tried!". Maybe it helps with other big FAs to see the Cubs involved in these types of biddings, but not sure about that.
My guess is that the Cubs were extremely serious about this but had their limits and would not exceed them. They went in expecting to be in the 10/$500m range everyone was talking about, but the bidding went beyond that and they decided they aren't comfortable going higher. Ohtani was clearly at least considering the Cubs, but if we never met with them when the Dodgers and Blue Jays did, we probably got filtered out because we wouldn't reach the level the bidding was at.