All of the things you're saying are the direct result of the market incentives created by low interest rates. Companies borrowed money and used it to buy their own shares for the same reason everybody was borrowing money to buy shares with it -- it's what people do when it's cheap to borrow money.

If your competitors are all borrowing money at low interest, you do the same or you're not competitive.

The problem is we lowered interest rates in response to the housing crisis and then left them there. Because doing so inflated (really reinflated) such a ginormous credit bubble that it would take more than an entire market cycle for real economic growth to catch up to it, and (absent printing money) you can only raise interest rates to the extent that borrowing demand from real economic growth exceeds the reduction in credit caused by the higher interest rates, or you cause deflation and an economic downturn.

This is also why the rate of inflation has been below historic norms since the housing crisis -- reduced to that level just by raising rates the tiny bit that they did. And now even that's gone and interest rates are at zero.

This is what the fallout of long-term low interest rates looks like. The only way out of it within our lifetimes would be mass defaults (which would cause a depression) or enough inflation to devalue the outstanding debts.

Considering that we're also now facing deflationary forces from these quarantines, maybe it's time to start printing some money. Certainly countering the deflation by encouraging even more borrowing would just be trying to dig our way out of a hole.