Saying that it’s “evil” and wondering “how they sleep at night” is unfair to your own intelligence and its ability assess the value of this function.
I guess if "Being good enough that people recommend it to others" is marketing, then yeah I suppose I'd agree. But when people talk "marketing", they generally refer to outbound one, and we could easily live without that and still find products, just like we did before "marketing" was the pest it's identified as today.
With that said, everyone believes they're a good person, every single individual on the planet probably, within their reality and their perspective. Including marketers, unbelievable as it sounds.
I don’t like advertising, but I think calling the act of or working in marketing evil is really reductive vilification. Try to take their point of view, and realize almost nobody is trying to make the world a worse place.
Yeah, this is just absurd. From the other side, probably marketers wonder how anyone implements these incredibly user hostile interfaces to make it hard for people to cancel, and how anyone could work on products such as Google and Facebook (even as they use them for work).
It's easy to scapegoat a group you're not part of, but it's generally not correct. Things are more complicated than you imagine.