I can see your train of thought and it makes sense up to the last part.

As someone who has studied sales and marketing actively for nearly two decades, built rather large companies and happens to be very good at pattern recognition, I know that people don’t understand what is being done to them.

Psychology has been used for a long time to study how to make someone act against their best self interest. Putting this on people with addiction problems is both selling them short and underestimating the problem.

Sales people in certain companies (that I have been to) learn how to use body language, speech patterns, behavioral patterns and other things to manipulate people into buying a particular thing at a particular time. Keep in mind that there is a human in control in this situation and unless they have psychopathic tendencies, they will try to work with the customer instead of against them.

But this is also done in marketing. Best example is the facebook/instagram/youtube algorithm, where the goal is to keep you on the site. It is done (very simplified) with showing you everything that will or might interest, aggravate or otherwise trigger you to keep watching. I‘m not saying it is impossible to leave but especially the not so strong characters will comply. Again, this is the majority of people, not the minority.

From there it is only a small step to actually selling you stuff your don’t actually want/need by showing you price increases (urgency), many different products (availability), fitting videos on other sites (cross site tracking).

These are only the ones I have crossed in my career. It shows that the mentally vulnerable (especially kids) get blasted with this stuff and manipulated into thinking certain thoughts and wanting certain things.

So, while your extreme boom example does play out as you say, the overarching problem has a lot less remarkable features and is therefore harder to spot and harder to fight.

Combine that with giant companies that own 60% of popular sports games for example and you absolutely have a problem.

„Vote with your wallet“ only serves these corporations because nobody cares about 3 less sales if you can manipulate everyone to buying more of these.

This is why the only solution that will put an end to this is outlawing what we call „dark patterns“ (google it) and break up large corporations.