alt Hacker NewsCompanies are not bound to sociopathically pursue profit. It would be in their long-term interest to care about stakeholders outside the boardroom, and until a certain person with tiny hands started a war on anything remotely "woke", the market rewarded ESG metrics.
Your point was true prior to 1980 or so, but it's a cultural average. We've had multiple generations of business leaders now trained on seeing the corporate legal entity as only caring about shareholder value and being proud of it and even perversely principled about it.