Misaligned incentives + tragedy of the commons explains most of them. At small scales (up to maybe 10 employees) the individual performance of employees is fai

Misaligned incentives + tragedy of the commons explains most of them. At small scales (up to maybe 10 employees) the individual performance of employees is fairly directly tied to their compensation. If they do well, the company does well, and they get paid because of that. Even a single employee doing zero productive work can be such a drain on profitability that it can make or break the entire company. Hence, everyone has to contribute to the productivity in a positive way. As companies grow through medium size (100-1000 staff), the employees can get away with being unproductive or even counterproductive. This is because efficiencies of scale start to materialise in a big way, compensating for even a fairly large subset of employees basically doing nothing useful. That merely decreases profitability to just 10-20% instead of the 60% that ought to be possible, which isn't catastrophic by itself, hence it is allowed to persist. As companies grow past 10K staff and the decades go past, the real enshittification begins. More and more managers at increasingly senior levels are now there purely to convert "the commons" (the communal value of the company, such as customer goodwill) into personal profit. For example, a hypothetical company that has the motto "Do No Evil" might have a manager attain promotion to higher ranks through a just a bit of evil. This is basically "cheating", which works, so they get promoted. They're a senior manager now. Rinse and repeat until all senior managers obtained their position and power over the organisation this way. Now the entire organisation is evil because everyone making the decisions is a self-interested cheater instead of a hard-working product builder. This is how you get ads in the start menu of an operating system you paid for. That got one guy a promotion, at the expense of a trillion dollar business. You, the customer, will now seriously start considering switching to a different operating system, along with millions and then eventually billions of other similarly upset customers. All because of one guy. One! Eeeexcept... it's never just one person. It's now every manager doing the same kind of self-interested evil thing, destroying the product through a million tiny cuts. That's the tragedy of the commons: "We all just have one cow, what's the problem? Oh everyone's cow fed there and now there's no more grass. Oops!"