So when I see someone who is going through trauma like this sharing a picture and asking for emotional support I don’t want to block them. I tap “hide” which then promptly does… absolutely nothing.
There is definitely a legitimate use case for the “hide” button where the two things you mentioned won’t really help.
I don't know if these things become fundamentally hard to fix at their scale, like it's possible that a "hide" button becomes too hard to properly implement if your feed suggestion algorithm has to handle millions of users at the same time. It's possible, but sounds hard to believe, because a lot of the quality has degraded in only a couple of years, and they haven't become orders of magnitude larger in that time.
Of course, it would be very reasonable to claim that they simply don't care. But their websites do keep changing, so it's also not like they have decided to halt development of this part of the UX and simply focused on doing advertising right.
Personally, I still suspect that regardless of their motives, there's a high degree of corporate inefficiency.
Regardless thanks to whomever at Facebook who got it fixed.
It has been like this for years now.
It also took months and months for them to fix a “phantom message” where it’d show I had a single Messenger message from the main Facebook app, despite there being nothing there (even in the ‘not friends with you’ section, I checked!).