Who is the audience your comment is trying to reach? Who are these mysterious "companies"?

It's important to realize companies are made of people.

Someone had to explicitly code the dark pattern in the GDPR cookie dialog. Ever notice the button for "Accept All" is big and shiny, while refusing all is more often than not a cumbersome, multi-click process?

That's not an accident. That was coded by people. People around us, people who post here. I'm sure "made GDPR dialog deceptively confusing" went on someone's accomplishment report that they then used to justify a raise or promotion.

My theory is that companies are not the sum of their employees. Employees are generally good; toxic humans are a small minority (unfortunately they tend to be over-represented at the head of companies).

But put employees together into a profit-maximisation machine, and the machine will try to maximise profit, with dark patterns and downright evil things.

Similar with our species as a whole: nobody is actively working to break the climate so much that their kids will die long before they reach the age of retirement. But that's what we as a species are doing together, somehow. Individually, we don't want that, but that's not enough.

Having coded multiple such buttons in the past, I'd like to ask to consider that the person doing the coding is barely the person making the decision. It's hard to reject such a request when your lifelihood depends on the job

someone coded it once, everyone else just adds another dependency that fulfills the spec, they don't even have to search for "dark patterns", just "most effective"