A little late, but this is only somewhat true. Stock buybacks only make sense if the stock is cheap to fairly valued. You need to think of buybacks in terms of a return on equity. If a company spends $10 billion buying back stock of their overvalued company which later falls 50% in value then that company is allocating capital extremely poorly. Companies should decide whether to buy or sell stock depending the company valuation. Tesla is an example of a company which has made some incredibly smart decisions from a capital allocation perspective not from buybacks, but by issuing stock when their stock is high.

That's not to say companies won't do buybacks though, just that they have a duty to shareholders not to blindly buyback their own stock if they believe they could allocate that capital better with an acquisitions, etc. At a time like this when unprofitable, yet very innovative companies have lost a lot of value relative to big tech companies like Microsoft and Google I'd argue that they might be better off allocating that capital more towards acquisitions than buybacks.

This is also why I don't really understand why shareholders of Apple support their current buyback program. Given their stock trades at a near record-high valuation both absolutely and relative to the market large buy backs makes very little sense from a capital allocation perspective. Although I guess they would argue there is literally no where else to put those billions of dollars. Still, that doesn't mean it's a good thing for shareholders, just that they're now forced to allocate capital poorly given their size.