There is research that suggests highly agreeable people do not do as well e.g. negotiation tactics. What is probably true is that is good to 'appear' agreeable. The same research suggests you are correct about the other 3 traits.
With some product categories there are independent testing laboratories that do a fairly good job of determining quality. The automotive industry comes to mind.
It seems it's a revealed preference that most people really don't care that much about quality, or there would exist a host of companies like Consumer Reports to meet the demand. Complaining on social media about enshittification and evil corporations does not put skin in the game.
I myself constantly complain about the atrocious quality of most consumer software products, but I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay for a subscription to an independent testing report.
This is basically a full-time job for many senior engineers. It may as well be the job description. Thing is, most of these 'leaders' are not capable hiring competent engineers - as if they're capable of identifying competence. You do not want to end up at one of those organizations - but they are everywhere.
It's interesting to think Microsoft was around back then too, taking approximately 14 years to regain the loss of approximately 58% of their valuation.
In practice, it seems that politics generally takes precedence over problem solving. If you look into the psychology of it, neither politicians nor voters are really incentivized to solve big problems. This is especially true for big problems that will take more than an election cycle to solve.
It seems to me that it would be easy to support an argument that suggests more big problems could be solved if incentives were better aligned toward problem solving and if competent people, not professional politicians, were chosen to solve them.
I've seen projects that failed, or were killed, likely at least in part due to a culture that encouraged poor quality and tech debt. This is preventable, and for no additional up-front engineering effort or time investment.