ît is not about making experiences better, it's about modeling behavior as to sell stuff
Evidence: actual work experience at building latent representations to characterize customer behavior at FAANG. It's hard to come up with something that really gets you, but it's not hard to come up with something likely to make you spend more. You're surprisingly predictable on that axis and even if you aren't because you put the hours into being a crazy outlier, almost everyone else is, and you don't matter.
What people don't seem to grasp is that most of the supposed alternatives to mainstream are pretty mainstream too or we wouldn't have stores like Hot Topic in the first place.