While I agree to an extent, every company would theoretically want to “fix the environment” if it made commercial sense to do so.
Some environments just can’t be fixed. The employer’s needs and the employee’s have diverged (or potentially were never aligned to begin with).
As a manager, I think I see this most often when a relatively average performer reaches a particular stage in their career and feels like it’s time for them to “take the next step”, but there’s no room for them at the next echelon because the few spots there are going to better qualified or better performing employees.
These folks start to disengage, performance dips, focus is lost. You can’t nurture your way out of this situation. Most employees quit at this stage, but some stick around long enough to be a problem. Most of these people also have a view of themselves which reflects what they were able to achieve at their peak, and blame their current performance on being “demotivated”.
In my experience, very, very few PIPs are handed out to folks who are actually, currently working hard, and in those cases, it’s because that person was never a good fit and should not have been hired in the first place.
PIPs will almost always end in termination because good managers will have already tried a multitude of tactics to improve performance, and bad managers are unlikely to be able to provide the kind of feedback needed to be successful in a PIP if they were not able to before the PIP. In those situations where a good manager is successful with a PIP, there is likely still an issue, because it took threatening the employee’s job to get them to fix their performance, when presumably they did not respond to less formal methods.