Advertising isn't why this happens. Massive greed, immoral behavior, and natural human behavior to be entertained and distracted is why you get screen addiction. Netflix changing it's model to ads based is because they make more money that way, not because viewers get more addicted from ads. Meta makes an absurd profit every quarter but two years from now they'll inject more ads into your feed to make more profit.
Corporations have record profits and record stock prices, and then fire thousands of people only to get rewarded with their stock price going up. The entire system is just set up wrong.
And IMO Perplexity is fucking gross way more than advertising.