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Are there another kind of company that has 2 billion plus users? Can you store 500 edges * 2 billion users in a off the shelf database system? That was available in 2009? It is from scale and necessity that this kind of software is created.
Developing tools costs money and unethical companies will always be more profitable than ethical ones as they have access to both ethical and unethical revenue streams. More profits means more money to throw at NIH projects.
The less barriers the people in an organization perceive, the more likely they are to innovate, whether for the greater good or not.
I agree with your point, but I've personally also experienced the reverse as well - having very difficult constraints while being extremely motivated and well funded has often resulted in extremely innovative solutions. All of my examples are classified, sadly.
I can see how more constraints can lead to more focused problem solving for sure.
Unethical from your point of view
still unethical no matter how you slice it.
Unethical companies get rewarded for their unethical behavior instead of being held accountable in any meaningful way. They then use their vast resources to grow their engineering force at an incredible rate. Moving fast means they are also accruing technical debt at an astounding rate, which then leads to throwing more of their resources at people to focus solely on solving these scaling problems.