I'm not naive. Owners also don't pay wages out of sympathy for workers. When they give away wages, they give away profits directly. If anything, short-termist managers might prefer to give away rights to future profits, rather than profits today. Also, you're assuming that small shareholders exercise power via their voting rights - nope, most small shareholders don't vote, not surprisingly since small voting blocs would rarely change outcomes.

And yet people overwhelmingly prefer to work for these non-employees owned companies instead of working in cooperatives - how do you explain that? They could take those humongous profits for themselves but they don't do that.

My answer to that question is that organizing people is much more difficult than everybody thinks and politics is the biggest source of inefficiencies on any human organisation bigger than a few persons. And cooperatives introduce additional political layer.