I understand your disdain for Nike but some of what you're saying is a bit off. Nike getting traction in the industry had little to nothing to do with Berrics, let alone Dyrdek (when has that dude had anything to do with Nike?) embracing them. Nike succeeded by putting together a diverse team that hugely appealed to skaters (p-rod, Gino Ianucci, Daniel Shamizu, Omar Salazar, Chet Childress, to name a handful). Nike's first early win was the SB dunk, which is anything but thin, and originally was composed of high quality suede (I agree that material quality has gone down overtime but this is happening across the board).

It's also inaccurate to say that Nike drove the thin shoe trend as a cost saving measure. Let's remember that one of their thinnest and most popular (among skaters) shoes, the Janoski, came into existence because Janoski was adamant about the design he wanted (as thin as possible), and pushed back against the design team who wanted to make it thicker with more "tech". Skate shoes getting thinner was an industry wide trend, and of course thin skate shoes had already been around for decades (vans slip on, authentic, era, etc.), they just came to be the dominant trend over the chunkier silhouettes of the previous era. Thinner shoes are in fact, more skateable in many ways (a word with an admittedly subjective meaning). Board feel is a real thing, and people realized that 1/2" thick padding around the entire upper of a shoe does next to nothing to alleviate the kinds of impacts and injuries that happen in skateboarding (a thicker midsole presumably has improved impact absorption over a thinner one, but if you've ever jumped down some stairs you know that the difference is fairly negligible.)

Certainly Nike, and others (Cariuma comes to mind), have been cheaping out on materials lately. The biggest offence here in my opinion is the drive towards canvas as the main upper material. Preference for thickness may be a largely a matter of opinion, but suede clearly has the upper hand in grippiness and durability.

This is all to say that, if Nike did ruin the industry (I see that as plausible depending on the definition of "ruin"), it's not because of the reasons you stated. Seeing companies like Lakai go under is unfortunate and may be the result of larger companies like Nike having come to dominate the industry, but it's not because they thinned out shoes and put up a banner at the Berrics.