I think its more that there are no ads, if there are ads regardless of an algo then there is money flowing into the feed and those that can keep users on the platform to serve them ads get rewarded directly or indirectly

Like it or not but the native ad model forms the basis for the ecosystem and then you get the secondary attention market where influencers play in, advertisers get to figure out how much it costs to reach a user via the native ad auction and then they can look at the CPMs and CPCs from influencers and try to mix and match their ad budget to get the most users