Complete nonsense, they just have a bot that optimizes for engagement, engagement doesn't equal longevity or increased revenue volume over some number of years. Nor does engagement mean that it's what you want. If someone walks up to you on the street, gets in your face and start assaulting you and you engage is a fight does that mean you "wanted" to get into a fight?

This is like an old school forum optimizing for flamebait threads, it's clearly not going to work. The major problem is that while advertisers love engagement they hate toxic content, low quality content, violence, drugs, porn, illegal activity, extremism, bots, trolls, etc

Eventually the media will build some story and the bottom will fall through, this process is just slower than usual because users are siloed into bubbles (like if you report a racist video they will show you much less, but there are still tons of people watching tons of racist videos and getting ads)