This was not something I thought about, understood, or really had conveyed to me until I was in my late 20s and saw it happening first hand with product after product. When I asked "why" the answer was there, but I didn't get the answer until I asked the question. I didn't ask the question until I saw the harm.

So while what you say might be true, there is still the question of what culture your from, how these ideas enter that culture, and when those ideas are introduced to the people in that culture.

There is the subjective experience of "collective consciousness" to deal with and subjectively, I think that "growth is great" was louder than "short termism is bad".

We were drunk on VC funded growth, and now we are dealing with the hangover and asking how we got ourselves into the position. Getting drunk was great. The hangover is not.