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Would that be because regulatory pressure or because the market encourages short term thinking?

I suspect kinda the latter, even though all legal literature on the subject claims that shareholders are the least important entities.

Somehow (neo-classical) economists have convinced the world that shareholder wealth are sacrosanct, and thus corporations will do all kinda of short term idiocies to boost share value and by extension shareholder wealth.

It's argue it's the idiotic practice of tying C-level pay to short term stock performance AND golden parachutes on top of that. You could say we're witnessing market forces at work and I won't disagree, but we're also witnessing crawling self destruction or a variant of tragedy of the commons.

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