> Or, you know, keep some money around to pad for financial downs during financial ups.

For most companies that isn't attractive because that means forgoing opportunities to compete/diversify (depending on situation) when the market best supports them, which means greater chance of firm failure. It's better to have to fire some people in pruning a line or reducing scale at the next negative market shift than to have to fire everyone when the firm fails.

I mean, sure, if shareholders are extracting value from the firm via dividends, you could in principle reduce those to provide the reserve fund—but most firms have shareholders realizing value by stock appreciation driven by perceived future scale, not current dividends.