It's an easy thought experiment.

Do you think that the most successful web companies in the world with arguably the best people i.e. Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube, Netflix, Snapchat etc. have no idea what they are doing. That the highly complex, expensive and latency impacting recommendation systems could be replaced by trivial sorting.

Or maybe they do work, do translate to increased usage and do significantly impact revenue.

Maybe they are considering that we shouldn't build and optimize our society solely for the purposes of maximizing revenue.

Would it be better to live in a world where Twitter (for example) existed because it is a useful thing and not because it might make lots of money?

Doesn't it lose a lot of money and its usefulness is directly correlated with its current massive usage.

It ran about break even until very recently.

A lot of people don't realize that Dunning-Kruger can catch any of us unaware. It's easy to look at a problem, think about the surface level challenges you'd have building it and come to the conclusion that you could do it better or simpler.

Try changing your ordering on Twitter to chronological and see how much you miss.

It's not just ads, it means the set of people you follow becomes extremely critical for your experience in a way that makes it far less engaging.

That may be good or bad for you as a user depending on what you want, but for Twitter having most people stick to the ML augmented timeline is essential to keep you hooked.