There are lots of companies doing well producing high quality products out of the gate today though, look at Linear.
Both approaches are valid for building sustainable enduring businesses.
Sure exploiting human attention to sell them ads, it's not technological marvel, I'd say psychological
Lest not forget when Hotz said he could easily fix Twitter's search functionality only to give up after 3 months [1]. When immensen scale is involved things do become difficult.
Like we have a comment below taking a shot at Phillip Morris [2]. Lets see you grow, process, and distribute 1/100 the quality of cigarettes. The end product might not be that great for society but it's not trivial to do it either.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/22/23472869/george-hotz-twi...
Technology wise they created React, PyTorch, GraphQL and Llama is open weights.