Heh, your post on the 'con' side of stock buybacks has a link named "shareholders should be required to vote on share buybacks", which is exactly what is happening here! (I believe that link is there because it was the original title of the article, but it wasn't sensational enough or clickbaitish enough for what passes as journalism these days, so editors later changed it to the "ugly truth" one there now.)

funded with excess cash that the business doesn’t need for innovation or expansion

You may notice that some of the posts which do really well and often outdraw @burnpost are precisely those posts which involve serious and successful development efforts!

I don't think anyone really disagrees that compelling value-add is better than burning, or even that rewards that attract new users are also great (though we in fact have only a very slow rate of new users at this point), but there are many, many payouts which do not do that and are not (at least subjectively) doing anything but giving away a lot of tokens to repeated milking that the recipients then dump on the market (see any exchange transfer report since ever).