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"Because" often doesn't make sense in the real world where anything that happens is the sum total of multiple factors. Especially a trend as broad as enshitification.
Being publicly traded seems like a contributing factor, but a sole owner can still enshitify through greed or incompetence.
I would guess that market consolidation and low competition are more of a factor.
It's also the anti commodity stuff IP has been allowing. If Hershey makes crap chocolate, there is little stopping you from buying Lidnt say. But if Microsoft makes a bad OS, there's a lot stopping you from using Linux or whatever.
What's worse is stuff like DRM and computers getting into equipment that otherwise you could use any of a bevy of products for. Think ink cartridges.
Then there's the secret formulas like for transmission fluid now where say Honda says in the manual you have to get Honda fluid for it to keep working. Idk if it's actually true, but I l'm loathe to do the 8k USD experiment with my transmission.
You'd think the government could mandate standards but we don't have stuff like that.
Reddit was shit before it went public or even before they were talking about making it public, so no.
The company I work for has acquired a number of small companies over the years; the result has been a mixed bag. In one case, the original product and employees were dropped completely, only retaining the IP. In a number of other cases, the original teams and products were kept intact with cross-over between products plus a huge boost in funding and customers over the years. In most cases, the companies were absorbed into existing management structures and the employees and technologies deployed inside the existing product line, sometimes with a few things that didn’t match the company strategy sold off or spun off into their own company.
Personally, I consider all the acquisitions except the single case where everything was abandoned to be a success; in that case, the exec in charge of acquisition was made redundant when everything else shut down.
I'd say it is more around companies that have a backing of expecting infinite growth. Infinite growth is impossible, but publicly traded companies are expected to always have their revenue line go up. But it's not just publicly traded companies that have a backing expecting infinite growth. Venture backed companies run into the same problem. Even companies that don't have venture backing, or are publicly traded, can run into the same problems if the leaders of the company don't have a long term, healthy growth mindset.