That sounds like a religion: You don't know exactly what you get, there are no guarantees but if you really believe in it (and pay your marketing church tax) you'll probably end up in CTR heaven.

If you meet ad agency people, you will definitely get that cult-like vibe from them. There's a definite slimey feeling to any of their conversations regarding work. I overheard 2 people from different agencies trying to one-up each other with their stories of how much of their client's money they spent on ridiculousness. It wasn't about how they could save their client money and then spend it in other areas. One person I met that worked in ad tech and I told him the efforts with extensions/private mode/vpn/etc to block as much of ad tech as possible. He was totally aghast that people would go to that much effort to block their "harmless" tech. Yet another Kool-aid drinker. I have a feeling chatting with any G/FB employee would be similar.

I worked in wealth management up until recently and can testify this exact behavioral bias was to be found in almost every single client, and sometimes in professionals as well, especially during market downturns. It's likely to be a mix of several factors, such as the fact that losses have a much stronger emotional impact than gains of similar entity, or the fact that most people aren't really trained to reason probabilistically in an intuitive manner. It is easy to be lured in by someone promising the moon when most people won't settle for anything less.

I believe there is some overall culture-rotting efficacy, but it's such a depressing conspiracy: complete coordination failure with real problems, and yet a cartel of marginally negative-ROI ad spending to prop up consumerism?