I doubt they're right, and/or I doubt they told you the truth. This feature actively impairs discoverability by putting the user in a Skinner box where they have to push a button, repeatedly, to make the negative conditioning stop. In my household, it mainly serves to make us "discover" what's on Amazon Prime Video instead.

Of course, many of Netflix's UI features have historically been engineered to make it hard to tell just how limited their selection really is, so autoplay does fit that pattern, at least.