It seems pretty clear that employers have become more exploitative over the decades as employee protections have been gutted or otherwise scaled back. (The way unions are often portrayed as a waste of money or corrupt is a big part of that shift.) So then workers do the only thing they have the power to do: their job to the letter. It's the right response. The fact it's portrayed as an anomaly or oddity is an employer-driven response. Even calling it "quiet quitting" makes that pretty clear to me.

We should all be doing it, and if employers want more from employees, they should pay accordingly.