Totally. Think of the timeline! By the time the writers have written the cliffhander endeing to the season, the actors acted, the directors directed, and the footage cut down into an episode, and then the episode aired, the writer at the beginning of the pipeline is so far removed from the end product that, while there's some notion of having the next seasons, the failure of the show doesn't hinge on the writer. Bad writing can sink a show, but good writing doesn't mean that a show will succeed. Thus the writer can't really A/B test their script like you can for a good/bad email campaign/website copy.

It's definitely a retention trick, but it's not a bad thing usually. Every episode ends with a cliffhanger. The season finale usually shouldn't.

The cliffhanger is a relatively recent innovation that is for retention. Episodic tv was just that, episodic.

Soaps have used cliffhangers forever and they are the definition of episodic tv.