>To be fair, they’ve been paying ~ 2% dividend yield that whole time.

If you check the total return price, they're actually doing better than the s&p 500.

total return for walmart: 223% (https://ycharts.com/companies/WMT/total_return_price)

total return for S&P 500: 221% (https://ycharts.com/companies/SPY/total_return_price)

So they're an average corp...

For a giant company, isnt that a good thing?

It's expected that some of them would be about average (relative to other giant corps).

Dividends don't always "hurt". They let one automatically claim profits on a trade, without the hassle of divesting shares.

With trades being commission-free these days, that benefit is negligible. Even with $10 trades (the usual price before commission free trades), and you withdrawing $20k from your retirement account annually, once a month, that works out to a drag of 0.6%. OTOH there's a very real downside to getting paid dividends (and incurring a taxable event) when your income is high (eg. making 400k bay area salary. If it was poured into the stock price instead, you could wait until you retire and get taxed on a lower marginal rate.

What I mean is, if I get a stock grant spread out over four years, then the shares I receive in year 4 have implicitly had their value decreased by the dividends paid out in years 1-3.

But that assumes the company has the choice of keeping dividends and investing it smartly.

you enjoy your annual ex/cum-divi volatility and applying income tax and potentially overseas withholding taxes and exemptions and treaties rules?

the administration and process involved in setting dividends isn't very trivial either

and too often maintenance of dividend payments are placebos for lackadaisical areas of more important management responsibility

and it's too common for factions in the boardroom to be trying to serve and attract entirely different types of investors who would be better served with tracking stocks or demergers and so on

for some people any dividend unsupported by a very clear rationale is a red light but of course if you are doing in depth company analysis you may have all of this covered in your models and settlement and actions systems.

Depends on the stock based compensation; some of them will be adjusted for dividends paid during vesting, and some won't.