The first thing to say is that this is because of the attention economy and the race to gather human attention. As it gets more competitive, it's not enough that you use the product. Where I used to get your conscious choice to use it, I have to crawl deeper down the brain stem and get you addicted to it. I need to create an unconscious habit inside of you so that you basically use it every day for that 30 minutes—to own that 30 minutes.
What started with no one using these sort of slot machines, where you check your phone like a slot machine and pull down to refresh it, the second that one person does that and it works really well at keeping people hooked, other people now have to start creating all of the slot machines.
If you think of it game theoretically, each player has to go deeper and deeper down the brain stem to do this. What we need to think about is how would we regulate that addictive process and instead protect human agency and dignity, instead of basically trying to erode it deliberately.
The companies have not been honest about this, as you've said.