I like this article, but I have to say it spills a lot of ink just to say that engagement metrics fucked us. These products stopped trying to empower us and started commodifying us. Marl isn't the problem; those execs are the problem.
Engagement metric focus can come from the bottom up, too. If you're an engineer who just build a feature you think is cool, but which nobody is using, it's very tempting to start applying growth hacks to make it more "popular". I have been through a few cycles of this on various projects in big tech.
