I feel like the majority of celebrity tech companies are like this. They attract a certain kind of person who gets easily bored and needs interesting things to work on to stick around. There is also internal pressure to justify promotions by building things with "large impact". And CV padding to move onto the next big thing.
So you end up with lots of large, complex, engineering projects with virtually 0 or most likely negative actual business impact, to keep all the smart kids happy. And these beget more projects to deal with the complexity. It's pretty much Parkinson's Law applied to tech.
> and the recommendation system seems far worse than the old days
That's partially also because they lost or let expire the licenses to so much content.
Maybe governments should, in the interest of all people, mandate that all owners of IP/content should fairly license them to everyone who asks to operate a streaming or purchase service... that way we'd get competition on service quality and features between streaming providers instead of having to pay more for all the "content islands" than we did for cable TV.
So you end up with lots of large, complex, engineering projects with virtually 0 or most likely negative actual business impact, to keep all the smart kids happy. And these beget more projects to deal with the complexity. It's pretty much Parkinson's Law applied to tech.