Because stocks kept trading at higher and higher P/E ratios essentially saying “the market thinks this company can make much more money in the future than they are making now.”
The problem is, most companies couldn’t, and as we have hit a recessionary phase those companies are now scrambling to try to show continued growth justifying their price.
The way they do that is by cutting off their limbs and selling them for short term cash at long term consequence.
So you see them cutting costs in all kinds of ways that screw over their customers but can show quarterly profits. Even though it means customers may not stay customers if better options appear.
So we are in this sort of pendulum swing period where large corporations suck because there’s effectively no competition that doesn’t and sucking is the last way for them to squeeze water from a stone. The natural solution is that we’d see competition rise up that doesn’t suck to take their customers away and force pro-customer changes.
This likely will eventually happen, but it’s going to take time. There are emerging tech trends that will accelerate it, but are still a few years away from practically changing the equation.
In about a decade things should suck less, and a number of the crappy companies around right now may no longer be around, but in the meantime it’s still going to suck for a while yet as things adjust to the dying of the old guard and birth of the new.