Your first paragraph about only profit mattering isn’t even hyperbole.

I’m a computer nerd just like many here, but I went to business school too. There’s no “haha screw the consumers” snickering when you learn about business administration. It’s a simple well-meaning concept that the goal of going into business is to make money for the owners who invested their own money into the company.

Private companies are one thing, but then once they go public, a whole new set of rules and circumstances occur. The “owners” are a nebulous cloud of faceless investors & institutions, many (most?) of whom don’t give a shit about the company itself, just the risk/return and asset category it represents.

The C-suite has a fiduciary duty to make that money for those shareholders, plus those individuals generally have to own a bunch of stock in order to further align their priorities with profit and share price. You don’t want the investing community to see that you had a chance to double profits this year and didn’t take it, which can lead to the short-sighted decision making we see so often. Plus driving up the share price short term makes you yourself able to cash out and diversify a bit.