What else do you do with those users... let them free ride ad infinitum? Do you have a better solution? After all, you can only woo those users for so long before it's a sunken cost.
It just sounds like they have no better ideas to me. Why not just make the feature human and build a little bit of customer loyalty? That's kind of my point. After a while people get so tired of this crap this might be why these users provide Meta no value.
And I guess, if they're already making ridiculous profits, why not just accept that some of your users are low value monetarily but do provide value by being on the network at all.
That's not how advertising works. If you're not looking at the advertising, you don't provide any value, nothing. In that case you're now a losing proposition and they don't want those users because they're lowering margins and ROE. It's about good decisions that make money... goodwill only goes so far on the balance sheet.
Now, you got my full explanation. If you still don't understand why it's not as bad a design as you first thought... we'll just have to disagree ;-)