Fully agree. We really should punish companies that blatantly push this kind of mercenarism. I mean, every VP and CxO join a company, he/she takes super short-sighted decisions that push some random metric a bit up, and then they leave with a huge performance bonus not caring if everything is worse. They won't be around to cope with the fallout as they are already in another company doing the same.

I am not again performance bonuses, but they should be attach to better metrics. Eg the number of happy users is still up in 3 years time. Or something like this.

This is my darkly optimistic take on enshittification:

Companies know how to make good product, but if they don't have "new and shiny" to impress us anymore, then their only alternative is to make things worse so they can heel turn and then make things "better" by unmaking all of the worse things they did.

They can also milk their customers coming and going in the process.

It's not "enshittify or lose", its just raw greed. Things will get better again, either that or a competitor will destroy them. Enshittification is just the current meta and a new one will come soon enough.