But also I think people forget: this is not cut and dried. This is not simple. This is not just "these companies are evil and should be stopped". It is: there is a market pressure to do these things. "I enjoy the product and use it a lot" and "I am addicted" is blurry and market pressure is not going to recognize that limit because it does not care about human suffering unless that suffering meaningfully impacts the bottom line.
If these companies hit regulations that effectively cap their advertising revenue per user (i.e. the "addictiveness"), they are dead. That may be totally fine, and I'm sure majority of people would rejoice hearing this. But remember: advertising dollars are earned, especially at tech company scale, by the effectiveness of the targeting to get get more $ / DAU since DAU cannot grow beyond the Earth's population and that is the scale that these companies have already achieved.
If you cap advertising dollars, you cap advertising effectiveness. You cap the ability for small companies to connect quickly with prospective customers without being locked out because they have to spend too much to find them. Yes you also cap scammers and other nefarious actors too, but thats arguably a different issue. The impact of reducing advertising effectiveness is disproportionately concentrated on small business where cheap and effective advertising is so important.
My hope is that there is a way to do both and I don't have to be constantly horrified when I look at my screen time hours.
Fourth option: product becomes less addictive and the algorithms stop optimising on "angry users click more". Less advertising profits, perhaps less engagement but probably still profits on advertising.
Fifth option: don't aim to continually increase profits and instead change the rules of capitalism to be less focused on making "profit at any price" to perhaps a more gentler form. After all, Monopoly(TM) is restarted once one player has all the money, it's about time that we do that in real life too or how many more trillionaires do we need?
So there are also grey choices here and not only b/w.
As someone who does both, it's quite lovely! You might even be happier doing that than whatever it is the modern internet has become.