people really don't understand what a blessing it is to not have sodas be free. that kind of culture with an expectation of it (and 'snacks') being free will create a lot of fatness in the industry
Curiously arbitrary to then not require that the definition include the ability to pay out whatever you got from the loot boxes in real money.
To phrase this in the most cautious way: The potential to win more money than you started with needs to be considered as a factor in the potential addictiveness or more importantly destructiveness of the entire process.
keep in mind that he is literally the only one who talks about the company that way from everyone whose ever worked there (many, many have left for various reasons since).
I also can't help but not overlook that he's an UFO nut. can't trust info from someone who can warp reality in a way to see only what fits his own preconceived notions even if they fly in the face of basic facts.
things like replication crisis being a matter of discourse is part of the scientific process. scientists notice results don't add up and slowly over time the thing corrects.
no need to imagine this, this is already the case in this universe. at least if we're talking about actually computing something, not just writing down the equations on paper.
for example from everything we know at least so far there are some truly continuous non-quantized quantities yet all numerical solutions can ever produce is an ever increasingly good approximation of something.
some constants are irrational so we can never get true values of certain physical constants, etc...
you and everyone else concerned about the preying on vulnerable thing should be aware that we have literally no evidence that such a thing is happening. the absolute worst thing we know off in practice are extreme edge cases (i.e. not applying to 99% of people even within the whale demographic) of above average earners spending their money on waifu shit instead of buying themselves a car they don't need.
the more regularly occuring thing is probably that parent's don't properly set up their kids phones and then they buy a few hundred or worse thousands bucks of something they shouldn't. but again those occurances are rare and don't cause really cause any actual damage, especially since you can get refunds for this stuff if it gets expensive very easily. kids regularly do stuff a lot more expensive than that. in fact kids themselves are a lot more expensive than that as a baseline.
the supposed exploitation of things like loot boxes has literally zero evidence behind it. all you will find are a few genuinely bottom of the barrel studies (as in that australian government study from some years ago, should literally be taken as an example in a book of how not to run a study).
and the constant comparison to gambling is really tiresome, because it's obviously not the same. people play themselves out of all their belongigs regularly with actual gambling, because their goal is to make a profit with gambling and their last gamble will surely turn it around. such a thing isn't possible even in the few online gaming markets remaining where you can resell your items for real money because its a big hazzle to liquidize all your assets.
doing mostly 'cog in a machine' type of work in order to make enough money to be safe and have some extra for fun and future planning is a core part of nearly every human life on the planet and most people get on fine with it, without wanting to kill themselves.
in fact for most people the situation is significantly worse, OP is in a privileged position in a relatively well paid industry with relatively non-menial work and is still complaining. there is no other way around it, there is something wrong with OP.
and before all of this corporate stuff developed, people were mostly farming all day which is hardly an improvement.
depression need not enter the picture. imo being a privileged baby having way too high expectations of what life is supposed to give you is all explanation necessary in this case. imo OP needs to stop being a baby and grow up. this might be caused by reading too much about how awesome other people have it and being jealous / not able to cope that OP is not in the same situation, but whatever the cause, the effect is obvious.