It's all this talk of poorly susbtituting emotional bonds with simulacra that annoys me. Seems like a motte-and-bailey.
Oh, it's for couples! Now let's go back to selling our subscription model AI anime girlfriend
In your wording it only looks like it is the exploitation of people by businessmen selling the happiness as a product, whereas it can actually be the user themselves developing it for their purposes (like when it's opensource, hackable, or even DIY, etc).
Anyway, my vision of the future is hundreds of millions of obese NEETS who spend their entire monthly UBI check on overpriced insect-protein food, clothing, video, porn and AI girlfriend-as-a-service products. Pigs at the trough, given just enough slop that they don't kill themselves, while the people who can resist temptation (say, helped along by their upbringing) get to be human.
It is true, but somewhat orthogonal to other problems such as how to reach happiness. As an intellectual leaning person, I tend (like you) to link my own happiness to greater ability of my mind, but that is absolutely not generalizable. For some other people, the notion is true but only regarding "to improve physical abilities", and they don't care about the other parameters. etc.
Moreover, the highlighted problem of instant gratification thus applies not only to sexual needs, but also to feeding needs, for example. It would be interesting to compare foraging/hunting societies with ours in this regard.