Dividends vs Portfolio Performance

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Not to re-ignite this boring thread, but I came across something today that might help explain my inquiry/observation.

https://www.morningstar.com/articles/956480/the-lowdown-on-mutual-fund-capital-gains-2019-edition
Excerpt: "At the same time, investors continue to yank their dollars from many actively managed funds, and that forced selling can compel management to sell appreciated positions. Those distributions in turn are made to a reduced group of shareholders. That's where big capital gains distributions come in."

This, and the inverse: a larger group of shareholders, could also apply to dividends as well.

My original observation was it seemed that a current year's dividend was out of sync by one year, reflecting the previous year, not the current one.

Now I wonder if a good year brings in all kinds of new investors and as a result, the same/more dividends are paid but to a larger set of recipients, dropping the individual's payment. Conversely a bad year has investors leaving a fund so that the following year there are fewer recipients to be paid.

Just an idea which per my usual, may or may not hold water.

For a normal (open ended) fund I believe new money is used to buy new shares of stock which will then generate new (additional) dividends. So that the dividend payout should roughly be the same, assuming that the fund's investment decisions did not drastically change.

Closed end funds (CEF), which are not as common of an investment vehicle, operates a little differently where investors are buying a fixed slice of some investment pool. More buyers would push up the price of the fund which would reduce the payout based off of the fixed pool of investments held within...everything else being equal.

I would expect the selling of shares generated by people exiting actively managed funds to be roughly the same result....except if the fund is not using a FIFO strategy then the later shareholders of the fund could be left with larger capital gains taxes than people who exited earlier.