My issue with shorting is that it makes it harder to run a...

My issue with shorting is that it makes it harder to run a company and bring benefit to society. Shorters are fincancially incentivised to damage the company, and there are many ways they can inflict that damage, some legal, some not, but when someone’s trying to build something great, it never helps to have people on the sidelines deliberately hoping to find ways to make it fail. Shorters like to portray themselves as policemen who spotted Enron, but they’re more like a vigilante force that’s paid by the size of crime they detect. And of course that means that the crime is bigger than it needed to be! When they spotted the issues with Enron, they didn’t report it until they’d taken their short positions, allowing the practices to continue inflating the price for longer than necessary. When it crashed, shorters sucked a load of value out of the market, causing greater pain for the victims of the crime than would have happened otherwise (all the money that went to shorters is money that was not available to compensate victims).
then shorters tell you that they provide liquidity and stop prices running too high. That’s a bit like saying that throwing chum into a feeding frenzy will fill up the sharks so they’re less likely to bite if you jump in. Whereas it really just attracts more sharks. Fake liquidity that is not constrained by the natural availability of shares in a company only serves to make violent swings in price bigger and more disastrous. During the GameStop debacle, the price shot up because shorters had risky positions they could only have taken by selling the same shares multiple times without natural finite constraints on availability.
obviously it’s legal at the moment, but that doesn’t make it good.