Cory Doctorow, on coining the term:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
The term was about online platforms degrading. This term described things like going to a subscription model, creating tiered subscription models, injecting more ads, and other practices to min-max short term profit on an online platform once enough customers were locked into it.
Since then a few examples I have seen referred to as “enshittification”:
A movie sequel not being as good as the first movie.
A game sequel not being as good as the first game.
An unintentional quality defect on a one-time purchase of a consumable product.
A UI change to software (that didn’t lock out previous features or change functionality) that the person personally didn’t like.
The price of a new (luxury) product being higher than the complaining person would like.
A restaurant changing their menu.
A specific product being discontinued.
A TV show’s writing getting worse.
The term has been so diluted it just means “a thing I don’t like happened with any product or service.”
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 & historic context adds clearly defined boundaries. 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.
Sorry I could’ve said that better. Tl;dr I don’t know if you’re right or wrong, and I don’t think we’ll have a good way to tell which for sure for maybe another 5-10 years. I spend too much time online and in niche spaces to have a good grasp on how most people actually use the word.