But again, the author's theory is that what's being optimized for is to get people to mindlessly click through an Amazon affiliate link and making a purchase. I

But again, the author's theory is that what's being optimized for is to get people to mindlessly click through an Amazon affiliate link and making a purchase. If people are doing that, they clearly aren't doing more searches like you suggest. "The search results are intentionally bad to make people search more and click on ads" would be a viable conspiracy theory in isolation, but seems to directly conflict with the complaint of the search results driving people to make purchases via the pages that showed up in the organic results.