There is no such thing as 'blunt' or sharp weapon, the market shows that all advertising has some efficacy (around 1% but nobody knows how much precisely). Internet advertising did not increase overall consumption, thus it is not more effective than the sum of previous media.
Anyway the biggest trick BigTech played was not that it hypnotized the masses, but that they convinced advertisers that they are better than everyone
Genuine questions: how do we know that? how do we measure that?
My own anecdotical evidence is that I consume different things. Anyway, would more effective advertising increase overall consumption? I would expect that it increases consumption of specific, tailored, targetted in detriment of generic.
So it doesn’t seem contradictory that overall consumption stayed constant while the advertising arms race advanced significantly.
Before deciding if "opening up new markets" is necessarily good we'd need to ask what kinds of markets it opened up. Most of what I see are content farms flooding search engines with SEO garbage, scammy businesses that sell poor knock-off products, and predatory ad tech. I'd prefer it if those markets had never been opened.