> I can't think of any non malicious reason to develop such a system for a website about silly videos.
Let me give you a few examples of cases where obfuscated or inefficient code exists:
1. re-captcha is "obfuscated", and so difficult that computers aren't meant to be able to compute it. It is used to rate-limit login attempts to secure people's accounts, among many other uses.
2. Cloudflare runs some obfuscated "are you a human" javascript to fingerprint you for the purpose of DDoS protection. This one is arguably less noble, but still not obviously malicious.
3. Games obfuscate code all the time to make cheats harder to develop and maintain
4. Youtube, netflix, etc have obfuscated code (DRM code) because legally they have to make an attempt to protect copyrighted works from being downloaded etc, or else they lose access to said copyrighted works. Tiktok also allows using copyrighted music I'll point out.
Depending on your viewpoint, perhaps all of those are also malicious, but I think many people view them as non-malicious, though perhaps dumb.
That said, I personally wouldn't give tiktok the benefit of the doubt here. All the other large social media companies maliciously capture as much data as they can about me in order to sell it to brainwashing companies (ahem, advertisers), to the point where I think it should be illegal, so I don't really expect tiktok to be any different.