I can’t believe I’m saying this, but that’s anti-capitalistic in an original sense.

One purpose of the free market is to deliver the best value to consumers at the lowest expense possible. If a company is making excessively vast profit, then there isn’t enough competition making a cheaper product of the same value to the consumer.

‘Excess profit’ can be argued as the free market not working. Profit has no value to humanity if the system doesn’t deliver on other promises.

Assuming workers own stock.

Stock holder =/= worker

No, just no. Capital extraction, be it dividend payout or stock buybacks, benefit existing stockholders, by definition. Stock buybacks, however, as opposed to dividend payout, in a free-ish market increase stock price, which prevents those with less free capital from being stockholders in the first place, which, under capitalist system, are the workers.

Stock buybacks benefit those with previously free capital while at the same time hurting those without free capital currently. In a capitalist system this does hurt workers quite a bit.