I work in the field and have seen companies who spend several million a month, agree with your key points. For companies of that size, data is everything, if a

I work in the field and have seen companies who spend several million a month, agree with your key points. For companies of that size, data is everything, if an ad is underperforming it stops running, if an ad is bringing you low quality clicks (for example, like farms) it will stop running too. It's really silly to look at someone saying they dumped $20k in FB ads and it didn't pan out without providing any kind of data at all, how many creatives/targeting permutations did they try? did they monitor their ads at all? did they try to negatively target those bad likes they were getting? I've even seen "custom" lookalike audience implementations, to squeeze that extra cost/performance ratio out of it.