Your framing of the core issue is all wrong. "the industry" is monetizing on an opportunity it helped to engineer, there is no point in pointing fingers as this

Your framing of the core issue is all wrong. "the industry" is monetizing on an opportunity it helped to engineer, there is no point in pointing fingers as this by itself will happen naturally. The real takeaway you should be left with here is the result of this social-economic engineering - people left with crippling debt and other economic or otherwise repercussions. People have "bugs" - you can engineer a way to make them act irrationally (against their own eventual good), this is actually a science, you can call it mass-psychology, propaganda, marketing and so on. Consider yourself lucky, for one reason or another you did not end up in this "trap" but probably not in the account of your "intuition" or "all comprehending knowledge"..