Company says that everyone should give them money and stop using competing products.

Obvious thing to say in the land of self-interest.

It’s a short hand way of communicating. Like saying that a good search engine tries to find the most relevant sites. Or a streaming algorithm tries to recommend videos that you’ll watch. It’s not that we are saying these things are conscious or whatever. We’re just describing what they do.

It’s not so much an aversion to algorithms as it is a version to corporate controlled algorithms (which are often targeting highly questionable metrics).