Unpopular Opinion

I think the real issue here is everything is degrading and getting worse. So the term is thrown around a lot.

Hoo-boy, wait until you hear what they did to the word meme!

I think the concept can legitimately extend beyond just online platforms. Not saying it isn't misused, but I think some of your examples can sometimes be the same basic problem:

Like a movie IP being acquired by a studio which forces the writers and directors to make changes in the sequel, to reach a bigger market or push merchandising or something.

Or a game production company forcing game developers to add micro-transactions.

Or new management from private equity forcing a reputable manufacturing company to use lower quality materials and defund QC.

I would broadly describe any situation where an intermediary business between creator and consumer makes things worse for both is enshittification. Online platforms are far from the only culprit.

It lost all meaning the moment it was coined and I've been saying it's a bad word from the start. The intent was understandable, and the attempt to wrap a complex topic into a single term is admirable, but for the vast majority of people, all they see is a word that means "thing got worse". And it only blew up because it comes off as a "sophisticated" way to say "shitty".

They enshitified enshitification!!
Can't have shit enshited anymore.

(But yes, I agree, it's an important concept/planned practice that ppl need to be aware of.)

I mean, its a term describing the consequence of capitalism but without the knowledge to understand it. The phrase isn't necessary if you understand the system.

And generally that is seen as "a thing I don't like has been implemented to increase revenue into a thing that used to work fine before at a lower cost."

I applaud you for not asking people to stop enshittifying the definition of "enshittification". I wouldn't have had the restraint.

There is another process at work here: semantic territorialization. A neologism was created by someone with a certain kind of knowledge. Doctorow has the kind of mental map of the world that comes from being a tech-focused author for decades. He created the term as a shorthand for a concept that is important within the domain he wants to discuss, giving a set of landmarks on his mental map that he hopes will transmit enough c0shared context to convey the shape of the territory. Then people who do not have anything like his level of experience with that area try to interpolate the space he has delineated on his map as 'enshittification' and think 'Uh... platforms... that's like what colleges do with Nazis, or something... and uh... customers... that's us, like me when I buy things at the store... and uh... fuck it, this is too hard. I'm taking the literal approach. En-shit-ifi-ca-tion... shitty-fy-ing... make shitty. Enshittification means make shitty. Too complicated. Enshittification means was good, now bad.' They strip out all the elements they can't understand and are left with a shiny new semantic territory (word) that makes them feel clever, despite revealing how little they actually understand.

It's incredibly depressing that language is such a godawful way to transmit meaning despite being the absolute best way we have yet discovered to transmit meaning.

It’s a perfectly cromulent word

People using a term incorrectly doesn't rob the term of meaning. Enshittification is an ongoing process across hundreds of web services and other industries. It remains a set definition, regardless of colloquial use. It remains a useful and insightful concept, regardless of mass appeal or adoption.

You're mad at people diluting the definition, but they can't do that; They can only demonstrate their own ignorance.

If you're the type of person who wants to punch a wall when someone says "irregardless", then you learn to judge words by their utility, not their use case.

Words are defined by usage and can have one or more common usages and idiosyncratic usages say in technical or slang parlance or misuse or similar to a common usage, but there's no clear boundaries for when X people use it to mean B instead of A that common usage changed. Because of that fact it requires an historic context to define clear boundaries on common usage, like generations or species a dictionary is a snapshot of a gradually changing thing. Your current perspective on it's usage failing any specific definition may or may not be justified under common usage, I don't think you can necessarily determine that from contemporary evidence though.