Ah, I finally begin to see what you mean. Sorry if I've been a bit boneheaded in this thread. I finally started googling instead of speculating, and I found this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/3pv8bh/is_it_really_tr... which seems to confirm your ideas about the significance of benefit corporations. It looks like the key legal case happened surprisingly recently - 2010.

Apologies again: you were right and I was blinkeredly literal.