When I dreamed about joining the industry a decade ago I saw all these new companies offering useful & innovative products/services that actually solved real problems and legitimately made people's lives better. I wanted to be part of this world and get in on the action, making honest money in the process - I provide useful service, customer pays me money. Win-win, right?
Nowadays it seems like every tech company's goal is "engagement" and any problems they solve (or claim to solve) are only there to convince you to "engage" with the product. Even when you think you've actually found a company that has a real paid product that shouldn't (and doesn't - yet) rely on "engagement" you will always find some assholes on the inside (typically in marketing) that chase this "engagement" (and over time ruin the perfectly good product).
You could say it's capitalism's fault but I don't think so. There are other areas where completely unbounded capitalism would lead to terrible outcomes such as ponzi schemes, and yet we mostly avoid these because we have appropriate regulation to deter this behavior. The problem is that we have zero effective regulation (the GDPR doesn't count until it's enforced seriously) around misuse of personal data which powers this whole "engagement" crap.
Fortunately I think (hope) there is light at the end of the tunnel. "Engagement" only works if advertisers pay for those eyeballs which they'd only do if those ads worked and the prospective customer actually bought the advertised product. As we are already saturated in ads (and/or people deploy countermeasures such as ad-blockers) and the costs per click/impression keep dropping the bubble will hopefully pop and it will become more profitable to sell paid, premium & ad-free products like it should be.