I agree with your statement, but to devils-advocate for a moment the details matter do they not? Ie if your scaling costs are high than wouldn't you need to extract much more from each user than if they are low?

Ie high enough and you're doing sketchy shit and selling every ounce of user data you can because you have to recoup some of the user costs. Low enough and users could "just" be a mind-share cost.

If true, the devil is really how the user has no information here. All we can do is assume we are the product and they're fully-evil. Unfortunately.