It's part of the same phenomenon we see in social media. The first waves of social media and YouTube were predicated on the idea that you either seek out content yourself or view a feed of content you'd already taken action to subscribe to/follow. Services like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pivoted to go from "pull" where users select content or stay within their own networks, to a "push" model where the algorithm predicts and autoplays content, mostly from strangers, based on highly accurate predictions of virality and eyeball-retaining potential.

Things like Netflix realized it too and buried the "Continue Watching" at a randomized index in an endless carousel, added Autoplay and even starts autoplaying something different after you finish a series. And of course, newer things like TikTok have always been this way. All these things are, I'd argue, user-hostile in that they're optimizing toward, in the extreme case, complete addiction.

No need to suspect, they are advertising that openly and are proud of it. Famously, years ago they invented House of Cards TV show by looking at the most popular search tags and picked the most popular ones to select a genre and theme of a new show. It was a story of many articles about Netlix back then.