The article makes many good points, it's written by someone who knows how to write an essay, and it mentions Linux.

Technology-adept people will always have ways to avoid the prevailing swamp of dark patterns, but that's not corporate America's target anyway -- that target is people who constantly react to things, who don't exercise agency, who don't possess any measurable degree of autonomy.

That fact results from our broken educational system. In school, people are trained to surrender their autonomy early on. People aren't being taught how to think, they're being told what to think. And if we don't fix that problem, no later interventions have any hope of succeeding.

Few things have simple causes, but this is an exception. Most people are brainless consumers because that's public education's goal. It's not an unintended side effect.

You're talking about a specific educational system ("our" system, "public education's goal"), but what the article is talking about is global. And the world's educational systems vary a lot. Now, yes, the effect is more pronounced in the US, which is probably where some blame can be placed on the educational system. But what can explain the remaining 95% (population-wise) of the world?

Maybe the algorithmic curation that's talked about here is enough on its own to prime the average user to behave a certain way. Or maybe humans are just like that and prefer it that way, and we're returning to the mean now that the internet is owned by average people. Either way, this seems to have a lot more complexity and I'm not sure if it can ever be solved at this point.