It’s typical tech hubris. For a consumer product, changes that are convenient to product development are almost always shitty for the customer.
When you are selling beef, do you worry about how the cows feel about it?
The point is users are ancillary, not the primary means of revenue. Whenever there is that mismatch, you'll have issues like this.
If you don't care about the welfare of your cows they will not grow as large and you'll have less product to sell.
Putting that in more literal terms, if you damage the user experience you will damage user engagement and your ad revenue is going to fall.
There's certainly tricks to treat the cows poorly and still profit for a while but this sort of behavior has killed many companies.
To use an animal aphorism used in the context of Wall St, "Bulls run, pigs get slaughtered."