The market may or may not be "deeply corrupt" to start with, but that so what? Is WSB making it less corrupt? If you think the market is "deeply corrupt," just stay out of it.

Short sellers are important market players. Yes, in an ecological (but not moral) sense they are predators, but a healthy ecosystem HAS predators.

People tend not to sell shares they should sell. Sometimes, it's a tax thing, sometimes, it's just psychology. Some people marry stocks, for better or for worse. Short sellers restore balance to the markets by selling unsentimentally.

Some short sellers do indeed game the system. First they short, then they piss on the stock publicly to move the stock down. But while that is going on, lots of "ordinary" investors are deciding which stocks are overpriced and betting against them. Attacking all short sellers on the basis of what a few do is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I have shares in a "long/short" ETF that buys stocks the manager likes and shorts shares the manager does not like. There's no hoopla about the shorts, no ranting about how terrible the shares are. But today, one of the fund's shorts soared, probably because of a meme-based campaign. The stock isn't any better today than it was yesterday, but it was up big, distorting the performance of what is essentially a defensive holding.

That's how the assholes at WSB wreck the market. If short-selling become too dangerous, not because the short-seller is wrong about the stock, but because WSB decides to squeeze it, then ALL short-sellers are forced to buy protective calls on top of their short sales. The resulting distortion to the market would be significant.