So you're saying that TikTok's support team doing a poor job of handling reports is proof that the engineering team wasn't tasked with reducing spam by writing code obfuscation?
TikTok is a huge company, evidence of what the support department does or doesn't do has only minor bearing on the whole company, and basically none on the engineering department.
The thing that seems most likely to me is that they care about spam, the engineering department did this one thing, and the support department is either overworked or cares less. Or really efficient which is why you only see "a lot of spam", not "literally nothing but spam".
TikTok is a huge company, evidence of what the support department does or doesn't do has only minor bearing on the whole company, and basically none on the engineering department.
The thing that seems most likely to me is that they care about spam, the engineering department did this one thing, and the support department is either overworked or cares less. Or really efficient which is why you only see "a lot of spam", not "literally nothing but spam".