I regret reading this "article". 58000 views on one video, a tag that has 158 million views, and a whole lot of tempest in a teapot. I learned nothing of value from this.

People hating consumerism is not new. Just like nothing in this article is.

Of course TikTok makes money from advertisers so I'm sure they will catch up soon and start deprioritising this stuff in their algorithms.

I don't think anyone is that advanced. As long as people watch it, they don't care.

They do, they use a "heating" button to promote content they gain the most money from.

See this excellent article about platform enshittification by Cory Doctorow:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Yes, but this is first-order thinking. That's common. The mechanism here is:

"Content X directly makes TikTok/Amazon/etc more money [better ads]" -> more profitable -> show it more.

Second-order thinking is much rarer, and looks something like this:

"Content X makes people more reluctant to buy stuff from other places" -> less profitable for someone else -> ??? -> shut it down.

This is much rarer. TikTok can run ads on both sorts of content, so we shouldn't expect this to be totally clamped down on.