I think it's more a case of Jevons Paradox. I work on Chrome, and many of the things we've introduced have been out of a genuine desire to make some task easier or solve some problem people had. But when you make it easier to do that (for whatever "that" you're speaking of), people do so much more of it that they wind up in a worse conundrum. I can cite half a dozen concrete examples of this that we have metrics for, from js speed to renderer memory use to tab count.

It's easy to point fingers -- dumb author, evil greedy company -- but the truth is generally more mundane and more perplexing: bad outcomes often arise from everyone involved trying to do reasonable things.

blaming the author when systems are designed to hit every dopamine and weak spot is not a fair fight.