If this was a spontaneous derailment, I would support this conclusion.
However, I will warn you that the only thing a board of investors can agree upon reliably is short term profit outlook. The most expedient way for a business to improve profits is to cut expenses.
"Run it till it breaks" is the norm in American industry. 20+ year old equipment is very normal. Businesses offshored investment during the early 2000s and what was being done to keep the system going ended in 2008 and the bitter holdouts were removed with the lockdowns and layoffs.
The people who own these businesses bought income. They didn't buy an investment and don't treat it like something that needs to be tended. The top isn't investigating the middle to vet its performance in terms of "are you actually running a good factory?" - they summarize all of this in sales vs expenses into a single metric. More profits means more betterer. Graph go up means more gooder.
The reality of one of the places I worked at was we were using turn of the century equipment. Literally, this thing was stamping out parts for world war 1 and possibly the spanish-american war.
To be fair… some things don't need to be ultra-modern to work - but I have machines that are maybe a year from breaking down, entirely. There are no parts. There might be some prints. People have been told about this and have been informed that every part we order for these things is custom made and about 10× more expensive than it needs to be. We could have replaced the equipment for the cost of parts being thrown at it at least two times over, and these things are wearing down in ways that there is no fixing without effectively re-machining the core frame. They were not meant to be the kind of permanent fixture they are treated as and there will come a point where the answer is "it's dead. If you want one, you have to buy one."
Every new group of mid managers treats the problem like a meeting they can reschedule at their convenience. We don't have time to do it, now. There is production that is more important, can we just run it for a bit longer?
Lead times on the construction of such equipment is months to years, depending upon the price of rice in egypt. There isn't usually a warehouse of these things you just snatch up and toss on a train. Each one is built to order.
So, when an IR monitoring station went off and indicated the bearing was on fire and we have whistleblowers saying they were told to stop doing bearing maintenance - it follows with my experience that we are being run by people who are not the professionals they think they are and who are not interested in fostering a professional society. "That is what I pay the professionals for…."
Now, are our foreign adversaries potentially assisting the decline of our industries? They would be silly not to, so I expect they consider this a payoff on such investments - but I highly doubt there was a specific team of sabateurs who went out to make sure this happened.
At least, I need more evidence to come to that conclusion.
Not everything bad that happens is the result of a bogeyman. The question is often not "why did a bad thing happen" and more a question of "what, in the complex of things we do to make stuff work, stopped working to create this disaster?"
The world is not a defacto state of comfort, success, and contentment. It does not necessarily require a bad actor to come along to create unpleasant, horrible things. Failure to do the things we should is all it requires for the world around us to become exceptionally hazardous.