What you are describing is basically a worker co-op: workers decide collectively how to distribute or reinvest retained earnings and plan for down years, and there’s no rich guy who owns the company and needs it to keep growing their wealth, so there’s no one with the power and incentive to direct everyone to screw over the customers. These exist today but have a hard time scaling in capital-intensive industries like global streaming where you have to pay the thousands of laborers who work to produce the content.
The problem is that private capital is always going to want something back; equity means ceding control, and debt at commercial rates means the repayment pressure recreates the same growth imperative you were trying to escape. This is essentially the socialist critique of capitalism. One of the more interesting socialist answers to the scaling problem is public investment banks, which can capitalize co-ops at patient rates without taking equity.
A PBC still has outside equity owners who need returns and have voting power. The designation gives the board permission to weigh stakeholder interests to avoid lawsuit, but: 1) it doesn’t change what the investors who funded the company actually need from it, and 2) it doesn’t change the fact that those investors own the equity and can replace the board if they’re unhappy.
As the other person mentioned, the problem with our current system capitalism is they still need to know someone “with tens of millions of dollars to burn.” Someone who, once they own a controlling interest, can just replace the board with people who prioritize returns. If we lived under socialism, those tens of millions of dollars would just come from the state as a low-interest loan that doesn’t confer control.