I did not explain myself well enough.

The essay show the timescale for "getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded" is 20 years or more, dating from the Eagle Creek purchase to the current "potentially up for sale."

That's a long time.

That means Theodores is also okay with the same decades-long process happening to "your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of."

And after a new company X gains market share for its quality, we should expect the vulture capitalists to come swooping by again.

On the environmental side, every one of these packs is plastic waste after 18 months rather than 10 years.

It also means the methods people use to assess quality, despite omnipresent supercomputer phones and video-quality wireless networking, is ineffective, and manufacturers worsen their products knowing that. Why hasn't it gotten better?

So no, I don't see how Theodores comment about the chain of events should make anyone else also feel okay with it.

The "simple" answer is "markets aren't like textbooks".

Consumers are lazy and greedy.

The side effect of which is not-strict-enough regulation of negative externalities. In a perfect world, people would care about the downstream environment impact at least as much as they do about their time/money. But, they don't.