The whole situation with attention economics is very illustrative of the neglected power of small things. Facebook can't really hack your dopaminergic pathways, however much they improve their feed AI. AdSense doesn't brainwash you to be a consumerist drone. Smartphones aren't exactly subtle with notifications, and it's easy to disable them. There's no violent, obvious infingement of one's agency, so the opinion that you still make your free choices is not without reason. But more often than not, people don't actively counteract these influences. They go with the flow, they allow the scales to be tipped a little. The more they do so, the more suspectible to distractions they become: that is, less prone to consciously deciding if the next stimulus is worth responding do. So even the tiniest starting amount of influence, as long as it isn't annoying and doesn't raise any internal alarm, is a seed of a serious behavioral change. This is how vulnerabilities work: it's not always intuitive that some small hole can compromise an entire system which is otherwise robust and adaptive. But you don't argue that this is pathetic, you go and patch it before the damage is done. Hard to do with humans.

On a more practical (if unrelated) note, I think all browsers should block website notifications by default, i.e. when you get a prompt about push notifications, Deny button has to be highlighted. And it shouldn't be ever shown on mobile.