Although you’re technically correct, I think there’s a qualitative difference here. Traditional advertising is priced on number of impressions. As a result, publishers are incentivized to juice engagement numbers. Practically speaking, that means outrage-generating content and similar garbage.

This sort of “advertising” is a class system, with one class of users getting some sort of visibility bump over a second class of users. The incentives are aligned with making sure the verified content is perceived to be high quality, so that being verified is a status symbol.

You could argue that a system with literal second-class citizens is worse than the current one, and you might be right, but I’m interested to see how it turns out. Nothing is perfect—everything has tradeoffs—and the current engagement-driven approach is a dumpster fire.