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It does seem to be the inevitable consequence, but often privatisation is required too.

Publicly run services and utilities often suffer from inefficiencies because there's no incentive to change the processes and lots of government funded agencies suffer from the "we must spend our entire budget or we'll get less next year" syndrome.

Privatisation replaces the leadership with people who are incentivised to make the organisation as efficient as possible, but the actual quality of the services delivered matters if people are stuck with a now privatised monopoly and they have no choice of provider (or e.g. energy companies where the choice doesn't really make a meaningful difference anyway).

Probably the sensible middle ground is for the government to maintain a sizeable but minority share in everything that gets privatised, with a general policy of never exercising the voting rights unless it's against a course of action that is clearly detrimental to public interest. Probably even the threat of being able to vote out key personnel would be enough to keep them focussed on serving the public better. And with something like a 40% share, the shareholders have enough incentive to keep profitability high, and the government would also share in the profits of the previously public entity.

There's no iron law stating that private services must necessarily decay or be under provisioned.

water companies in England and Wales are perhaps even better

the same sorry ass situation that PG&E is in California, everything is brutally expensive because it's an absolutely shitty old system sustaining an overgrowning fucking sprawl (which coincidentally also means more roads and pipes and less trains and tickets)

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At first I thought it was gonna be Babiš. Thank god not

Nice surname, by the way!