At the very least once people get into them it makes it less likely that they will do… anything else.
Some of the stories I hear about younger peoples’ addiction to Instagram and TikTok are incredible. We’re talking many hours per day.
It’s easily worse than TV especially since the latter is frequently a social experience. People like to watch shows together. Social media, ironically, is usually consumed alone, making it possibly less social than TV.
Humanity is a history of addiction. Most often when you see parts of history that were not, it's because humans spending there energy in staying alive. Whenever humans start having excess capability to live you start seeing all forms of addition return. And yes, building your church 10 feet taller than the other one in town is a form of addiction that feeds egos and the sense of self. There was no great meaning behind doing it.
If people had fulfilling lives, consumed by work, family, community, and culture, there'd be little room for such addiction. The real story is a loss of meaning; it's a crisis of nihilism, more than gamification.