Advertisers encroach on every platform and it really sucks. Youtube for example didn't really develop anything worthwhile for users. 5 years ago the platform was so much more interesting. It still is, but navigating content was made really difficult with "adjusted" search results.
Sites that constantly evolve and try to reinvent themselves annoy me way more.
This makes sense from the perspective of the relationship between, say, Kim Kardashian and Instagram. More reach is directly valuable to some people.
But it kind of falls down when you think about the ordinary customer base. A lot of people will want to follow Kim Kardashian. They may not have any other reason to use Instagram at all. But when they try to follow her account, it doesn't look good to show the message "you can't see Kim Kardashian's pictures, because 200,000 other people have already signed up to look at them. Try asking Kim to upgrade her account! (But no, you can't message her here.)"
Summary -- charging popular accounts for potential reach, as opposed to charging advertisers for pushed advertisements, can have strong negative effects on your user base, despite the fact that those users never wanted the reach. They did want their favorite popular accounts to be able to reach them.
That is now how it works. People subscribe to more than one content producer which allows the aggregator the power to merge and reorder the individual streams. You do not pay for being displayed, you pay for being prioritized in the stream.
Crackpot theories aside, likes are just a stupid way to look at the world, the bigger scandal is how long it took all these supposedly smart people to figure that out.
Top influencers make a lot of money based on those metrics, Instagram doesn't see a cent of that yet they support these "businesses". Does anyone consider what it costs to distribute a post to 10s of millions of people? As an analogy, consider a system where advertisers paid the actor and the film crew to produce an ad, which was then distributed for free by the television studio. Not going to happen as it's completely unsustainable. Instagram is increasing the monetisation of the platform, and allowing advertisers free direct access to the metrics means you can't sell it.
Once it's gone, expect Instagram to roll out a new system where influencers will need to pay for potential reach and Instagram will start making a lot of money.