Enshittification has less to do with capitalism, and more to do with users' willingness to put up with bad platforms and products (overused aphorism aside). People who attribute the decay of products to capitalism have a hard time looking over the wall outside of their sandbox to potentials they have yet to know or realize.
I think it has everything to do with modern capitalism. The recent playbook is not "make a good product, sell it for more than you make", but more like "give away a product for free until you're a near monopoly, then start turning the screws on your customers". It's hard not to "put up with bad platforms and products" when your family, friends, and sometimes local city services are all using those platforms. And why are they using those platforms? Because they were initially attracted to the platform when it was good - i.e. before it started monetizing like crazy.
For modern capitalism: capitalism as it has manifested, particularly recently, or probably more accurately _redefined_, has been the result of two driving factors: imperfect information (sometimes intentionally, sometimes due to complexity) and regulatory influences. Companies are able to put the screws to their customers because their customers do not know or fully understand the true costs of that gmail account or Prime membership. Even if the result is a monopoly (as defined by today's parlance) there's nothing stopping a competitor from coming in and offering a superior product. The only time this is problem is when the company can use regulations as barriers to entry. However this is often often mislabeled as market capture.
Market capture cannot exist without regulatory capture in free markets.
Then there's the inertia, which can be fully expected, and the company's disincentive to make breaking it easy. (GDPR has taken measures to address this but nothing similar exists in the US nation-wide but that's for data only.) The cost to move must be sufficiently low in order to break that inertia. In nature you'll see Pareto distributions all around, so it's almost as if this phenomenon is to be expected. But that doesn't mean it cannot be done.
On a long enough timeline every product dies, and their lifespans are getting shorter and shorter.
I’ve noticed it has become trendy to yell “capitalism is bad” because monopolies have been allowed to form and fester. It is interesting that the trend is not to point at the regulators who have utterly failed to do their jobs. And it is concerning that the subtext is that we should centralize even more power on the structure that is failing us.
Enshittification has less to do with capitalism, and more to do with users' willingness to put up with bad platforms and products (overused aphorism aside). People who attribute the decay of products to capitalism have a hard time looking over the wall outside of their sandbox to potentials they have yet to know or realize.