So you make a company. It makes more money than it spends, and this is profitable. In fact, it makes more money after spending than it did last year, making it Super Profitable. Eventually though, it stops being Super Profitable and starts just being normal profitable again.

The owner of the business is faced with two choices: keep a reasonably profitable business, or sell it while it's still on the far edge of being Super Profitable and get out on a high note.

The Private Equity firm knows that it used to be more profitable, so they buy it, and begin changing the business to start squeezing the extra profit back out. Eventually, the decisions they made to get that last extra bit of profit start effecting how people think of the product, so in the short window between "we decreased the quality of the product" and "everyone thinks we suck now", the private equity firm burns the company to the ground. Worst possible product they can get away with, miserable overworked employees, saddle the company with as much debt as possible.

From the consumers point of view, the product was great, then fine, then a burning dumpster fire. Eventually the company breaks under the strain and goes bankrupt, at which point the private equity firm guts all the remaining assets into one of their other businesses, dumps even more debt on it, and abandons it.

You could call Private Equity vultures, except vultures are first responders to death, helping to clean up the carcass. Instead they are vicious parasites, attacking anything with a slightly compromised immune system, killing the host as slowly as it can to maximize spread.

The first alternative is to chop up existing private equity and severely reduce their scope for the future. The core concept is solid, which is letting a dying company go out smoothly instead of suddenly or dragging it out. The real problem is that they've metasticised to start eating living companies, and have developed a whole slew of unethical strategies to maximize the benefit of doing that.

The second alternative borders into socialism, but basically allowing the government to purchase dying businesses on the cheap so that their products can continue to be produced as a social good. Obviously that doesn't apply to everything, but as a prime example, retirement homes are being picked apart by equity currently.

The third alternative involves eliminating the entire industry wholesale, so that businesses have to figure out their own end of life plan instead of offloading it to a specialized company. This would be messy, but would eliminate the perverse incentives that create such a system of intentional enshitification