> lot of the negative reaction to them seems to me to be mostly emotional

Mine specifically stems from PE buying up all but one 24x7 emergency vets in a 20 miles radius from me. All of them were thriving businesses. There is only one remaining non PE ones has its days numbered. After monopolizing the emergency vet market, they shut down a few locations, which previously acted as competition for each other, effectively cementing monopolies in those individual neighborhoods as well. Now, you pay $200 to just get your pet checked out and always have to wait anywhere between 6-8 hours in triage if your pet isn’t literally dying, because they are perpetually understaffed and there are no other options. They also recommend unnecessary tests and treatments, present them as “optional” but refuse to treat your pet if you don’t agree to their “optional” treatment plan.

What you are describing the best-case scenario. They happen.

What also happens is, they take operating businesses with reasonable returns, buy up all it's supply chain or it's competitors to reduce costs or enable monopoly pricing, then load the company up with debt, squeezing it into a terrible company. That is the bad scenario which people object to.

An example: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house

They could do this, but there's not enough targets of this type for the money invested in the sector. They've also proven to not have the advertised & applicable expertise to run companies any more efficiently than current management. Nostalgia had nothing to do with it unless that's one of the company's assets. I've been inside on three PE acquisitions, and 5 sales by PE to new funds. The playbook was the same for them all: predictable, decent cash flow, cut expenses, grow enterprise sales, sell on before long term cracks from lack of strategic investment showed. If anything they accelerated the decline of healthy going concerns, but at each sale the insiders did great.

1: "Shouldn't be profit oriented"

2: ???

3: "too expensive to offer at scale"

Except that Americans pay far more for these services than places where they aren't profit oriented. Try again. Reality does not support your assertion.

Lol, the "it's actually good for customers" response is "they should have paid more"? I love it.

Most people would say that extracting wealth and concentrating it into an ever shrinking group of elites is making the world worse. They do this both from the companies you and I might work for, but more importantly from the markets that have no defenses.