Tetris and civilization are also harmfully addictive, but the scope of the behavior they can hijack is lower. "One more turn" at 2am is harmful. Just not as harmful as something that knows about and interacts with every aspect of your social life and your view of the real world around you like social/media apps do today.

A really well built hammer doesn't make you want to spend all your time using a hammer, it's just good when you need a hammer. That's a well-made product that you choose to keep using.

there's hundreds of good books on all types of addiction, including home shopping network style, gambling / lootbox / gacha, adrenaline, sex, and so on. My spouse, at the beginning of this month, went to a 2 day series of lectures about novel treatments for gambling, as part of their CEU for their license. I know most of HN won't know what i am talking about, so:

In general professionals must be licensed and bonded. The state requires a degree and a test for the first license, then, for my spouse's, something like 8000 additional hours of training, and something like 100 hours of continuing education per year. a CEU is 1 hour of continuing education. you have ~5 years of time to transition your license by doing the above training and CEU - as a rolling window. Doctors, nurses, etc all have to do this sort of thing.

Would any of you put up with that kind of stuff to make $80k a year?