"In moderation and with self-awareness" is the same argument typically used for the licitness of drugs, alcohol, nutritionally devoid food, and dozens of other externality-generating vices.

Yes, they frequently replace deficits in an individual's life with something that would otherwise cause them to disrupt the status quo. The question remains, at what cost? Is it sustainable? Are these activities robbing some humans at the expense of others?

Consider a YouTube video: Water Bottle Flip 2. It's about five minutes long and has been nominally viewed 300 million times, plus change.

That's approaching 3000 years of human time spent for a single video on a single service. The audience was probably entertained for that period but at what cost? What could have been in that lacunae? What else could have been accomplished or learned with that 3,000 years? What was the opportunity cost? For the countless children who watch it, what part of the pre-Internet childhood shared by all human history is being sacrificed for it? What part was sacrificed for the 23,000 years spent on Baby Shark?

I don't disagree that there is a place for moderation and art, but what we're seeing on a grand scale is that the ascendancy of cultural forms that enable moderation are themselves being consumed or otherwise blanketed out with dopamine levers that are the first thing many people touch in the morning and the last thing they touch at night. That's not playing guitar, restoring vintage computers, or collecting Magic cards. That's a massive undiagnosed public health crisis.

> That's approaching 3000 years of human time spent for a single video on a single service

> What else could have been accomplished or learned with that 3,000 years?

A video does not become more or less of a waste of time, per person, based on how many people watch it.

You could identify a different statistic, say hours watched per person, and make a different "scale of video watching is wasteful" argument.