I don't think he's punting. He's saying that actually looking at the actual humans is misguided, because they can and will be replaced or exchanged with no effect on the system as a whole. At the micro level, a department or even a company may change course in a noticeable way with one person being replaced. But industry wide, and society-wide, the "actual people" are mostly irrelevant to the mechanics of the system.
they can and will be replaced or exchanged with no effect on the system as a whole
Which just punts on the next question: why? Who set up the corporate structure that way? Answer: other humans.
Corporations and othe large organizations don't come into existence by magic, and they don't develop structures that make people, even at the CEO level, into replaceable parts, by magic. Human beings have to make choices for those things to happen. Human beings can also make choices to change those structures, if that is what needs to be done. But to do that you have to stop ignoring the fact that it is human agency, not some amorphous "corporate" agency, that is causing the problems in the first place.
BUt corporations don't behave like human beings; they are not run by moral human motives. You keep your job at a corporation by promoting the corporate interest. That means profits, efficiency, etc. If you fail to make your numbers, you'll be replaced by someone who will.
So corporations are definitely NOT run by humans behaving sensibly, but instead by a strange machinery specific to the corporate ecosystem.
Corporations don't "behave" at all. What you really mean is that human beings behave differently when they work for corporations:
You keep your job at a corporation by promoting the corporate interest.
That's true, but that by itself doesn't make the behavior immoral. If the corporate interest is best served by making products that people actually want or need, and selling them at a fair price, then keeping your job by promoting the corporate interest is perfectly moral.
If, on the other hand, the corporate interest is best served by something else, then we, as humans, need to revisit the whole issue of corporate governance: what is it that puts corporate interests out of alignment with our interests as human beings and members of society? And you can't just say "get rid of corporations" because corporations are necessary: without them we wouldn't have enough food, wouldn't have houses, wouldn't have cars, wouldn't have computers or the Internet, etc., etc.
None of us can survive purely by our own efforts; we need to be able to specialize and trade, and we need to engage in collective projects that required the coordinated efforts of many people. Corporations are a necessary part of doing that. The fact that the legal powers we give corporations have been abused does not mean all corporations abuse them. And the abuse doesn't happen because corporations magically do things without humans doing things; the abuse happens because some humans use corporations as tools to prey on other humans instead of providing value.
