On one hand yes, if everyone stopped buying their product then the company would go under. Just like if you just eat less, you’d lose weight
But these such oversimplifications that they lead to the wrong conclusions. You want to lose weight? Learn about nutrition, avoid triggers, and learn to cook from single ingredients. Raw willpower can work… But it’s basically the worst strategy. Most people can’t do it, and most of them that do regain the weight within 18 months
You want companies to stop doing consumer hostile things that destroy companies? You need to look at the small number of people making profits on the process of destroying the company
The problem with economics is that it’s taught like a religion. You get nice, believable mechanisms, but not only are they not tested empirically when they’re adopted, it takes decades of being obviously false for the idea to lose steam.
Inflation is an example… Wage growth is empirically not tightly coupled to it - we have the numbers, they aren’t ambiguous. But you tell this to people and they’ll scoff, because the commonly used model of economics says so in a neatly packaged narrative.
Voting with your wallet is the same. Refusing to buy a product does not push a company in a desired direction, they’ll (accurately) see it as a pr and/or marketing problem. It’s cheaper to change the minds of consumers than the build better products, it’s cheaper to lobby governments than to clean up after yourself, and it’s easier, more reliable, and highly profitable to reposition yourself to win big by tanking a company than it is to making it better