On the other hand isn’t the driver for “enshitification” the ever present chasing of profits for the next quarter

Quite so. Like most things, balance is required. Short term vs long term profitability is underappreciated in today's CEO class.

You have to beat inflation. It's not long or short term profitability, it's taking an asset and making it return more than inflation. Treasury bonds or stocks or mobile home parks or monkey nfts, it's all the same thing.

Again, that's with the mindset that the reason to own shares is because they're an appreciating asset.

If you study the history of what investing in a company via shares has historically meant, you'll find that it's only really in the last half century that the "appreciation game" came to the forefront. Dividends yields (or equivalent) were the evaluation criteria for these investments prior to our current era.

You speak about inflation and stock as if the cause/effect relationship is crystal clear and unidirectional, I wouldn't be so confident about that.

Wouldn’t you want the returns represented by your dividends to beat inflation too? Assuming you’re not investing in something for non-monetary gains, if the dividends aren’t beating inflation at least most of the time, why would you stick your money into stocks when you could just by I bonds from the government?

Why wouldn't they? If the company is healthy the dividends paid will reflect macroeconomic inflationary processes.

I don't think "you don't want to beat inflation?!?!?!" is a good faith interpretation of what I'm talking about higher up in the thread - which is rampant speculation for the publicly traded companies, and behavior tantamount to rug pulls in the case of private equity.