> Does it maximize time spent on the site

That one in particular is super dangerous.

It can incorrectly lead to a process that used to be a 5 second thing suddenly becoming a back and forth 2 hour nightmare, because the metrics show "user spends more time on site".

Though in reality it turned the user from a happy user into a frustrated one whose likely to exit the platform.

Oh, GitHub is probably using a variant of this metric... :)