Then facebook turned to "let's show you random political articles instead of your friends dinner plates", and people moved to instagram... which stopped showing your friends dinner plates soon after it got bought out by facebook and it too replaced the friends dinner plates with random "reels".
If the kids only saw stuff posted by their 'friends', instead of being pushed a lot of random garbage they never decided to 'follow', it would still be a much nicer place.
Even consider your innocuous example of dinner pics. Kids are extremely insecure and prone to envy. Obviously some are going to be eating much more nicely than others on average. Think about the knock-on effects of that when suddenly that's being shoved in their face. And again that is for a behavior that you yourself offered as ostensibly harmless. In practice far worse things happen, and constantly.
I disagree. When you only saw what you followed you ran out of 'content' regularly. For example, it was a common feature on Twitter clients to maintain your scroll position in your feed because keeping up to date with it and reading it in its entirety was the norm. Same goes for Facebook. Your friends only posted so much content. The 'addictive' aspect was you had to check regularly to see if there was new content. That is very very different from endless feeds full of content that is forced in front of you by the algorithm,