This strikes me as a distinction without a difference.

You're right in an important sense. There's not a complete difference in outcome between direct manipulation of wanting with drugs and using enjoyable stimuli in some form of unethical non-consensual conditioning program (aka advertising). It is one of many scales of magnitude and a lot of abstraction but that's still bad.

What I am trying to get across, and what I'd hoped all the conditionals and premises I laid out in my original comment made clear, is an additional consideration:

Screens are not drugs. They are not somehow uniquely and magically addictive (like drugs actually are). The multi-media is not the problem and not the device to be regulated. The corporate structure and motivations are the problem. This issue literally applies to any possible human perception even outside of screens. Sport fishing itself is random interval operant conditioning in the same way that corporations use. And frankly, with a boat, it's just as big of a money and time sink.

We should not be making laws regulating screens themselves because we think screens are more addictive than, say, an enjoyable day out on the lake. They're not. You could condition a blind person over the radio with just audio. The radio is not the problem and radios are not uniquely addictive like drugs.

I am saying it's important not to think of screens as the problem. The problem is the corporations' behavior and scale. That's a big difference in terms of the legislation used to mitigate the problem and the people to which it will apply. The Digital Markets Act in the EU is a good template to follow with it only applying to very large incorporated entities acting as gatekeepers.