> It's been a long time since "quality" and "success" have been decoupled.

I think so, too.

I guess quality was a property of interest in the old days, because the path e.g. for commercial music was: Maximize profit -> Maximize sales -> Maximize what the target audience likes -> Maximize quality.

For TikTok etc. they bypass the market sales stuff and replace it by an 'algorithm', that optimizes for retention, which is tightly coupled to ad revenue. I imagine the algorithm as a function of many arguments.

Just relying on quality is an inefficient approximation in contrast to that.

The Art of Zen and Motorcycle Repair will teach anyone all they ever need to know about quality.