If you think we'll ever have a social network where this is not the case, I'm afraid you're an idealist who hasn't seen this cycle go through enough times to realize that the business model makes you, you don't make the business model.
From that perspective Meta is the only thing it could've been. Threads is fine, it has a good chance of success, they need to iterate quickly on it, and because they're a small team, with a brand new codebase, and a massive, well-tested scalable architecture behind it manned by thousands of quality engineers, I'd bet on them to be the biggest Twitter clone to take a chunk of the dying bird in the coming months. Probably won't be the only one. Bluesky and Mastodon will play their own role.