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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.

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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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