I can only speak to Facebook since that's what I have knowledge of, but I agree with the premise that user experience gets sacrificed to juice numbers. The market rewards growth, so that's what companies optimize for. When the growth doesn't happen, a company that still makes tens of billions of dollars in profit takes a huge stock price beating.

The people who work at the company are paid partly in stock, and that stock becomes 40-75% or more of their compensation at higher levels. Throw in an employee review process where increasing metric X by Y% can be called success and net you a nice multiplier of 25%-300% to your annual bonus and annual stock grant, and you can be damn sure the employees are focused on the stock price as well.

TBH, focus on AR and the Metaverse is one reason I have more respect for Zuckerberg. Current offerings are the equivalent of early tech demos and don't represent anything approaching a "final" result. This is a long range vision and will require many years of work for the hardware and software to even be remotely capable. This comes with a big hit to stock price, though.

Who knows if it'll be successful, but it's nice to see a company take a gamble on a long range vision, even if it's partly out of necessity due to the current market being tapped out.