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I don't think anyone is that advanced. As long as people watch it, they don't care.

They do, they use a "heating" button to promote content they gain the most money from.

See this excellent article about platform enshittification by Cory Doctorow:

Yes, but this is first-order thinking. That's common. The mechanism here is:

"Content X directly makes TikTok/Amazon/etc more money [better ads]" -> more profitable -> show it more.

Second-order thinking is much rarer, and looks something like this:

"Content X makes people more reluctant to buy stuff from other places" -> less profitable for someone else -> ??? -> shut it down.

This is much rarer. TikTok can run ads on both sorts of content, so we shouldn't expect this to be totally clamped down on.