Feels like the race to the bottom is nearing the finish line
And it seems like the one time they did face consequences for their fake ads four years ago clearly wasn't enough [1].
All of these appear to enjoy a lot of downloads, so whatever tricks they are using works very effectively.
That's because "# of downloads" is a crap metric that's easily gamed (be it by fake ads or bot campaigns or whatnot). A more useful metric would be "# of installs still active after 1/2/4 weeks", that would disincentivize a lot of these scams, but at the cost of Google being able to claim download numbers for the vitality of their app store ("# of app installs a day!!!"), which is why Google doesn't do much against this shit despite the "quality" dragging down the image of the entire Play Store. Unfortunately there is no competition worth the name as the Apple Store is similarly plagued by copycats and fakes, so neither party has an incentive to de-enshittify.
But they don't make money on clicks, they make it on whales, so they are also going to get rid of pseudo-games that can't get whales to spend more microtransaction money.
This video did a very good job of explaining it, to me, someone who never plays mobile games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhajAqI66nU (https://archive.org/details/youtube-NhajAqI66nU).
tl;dr: it's all about getting whales into the game. The type of games people will download based on ad game-play are not the most monetizable (b/c whales). So the main game is a highly monetizable city-builder (which whales spend on), with the ad's minigame somewhere (which at most only has a few minutes of playtime). The ad's mini-game is often developed as a concept for the ad first, then only actually implemented later after A/B testing the ads. It doesn't matter that most people will get frustrated and delete the game when it's not as advertised, because the people who do that aren't whales.