Indeed! And it's great that you call out the information deficit model too. I strongly suspect that the deep motivation is loss aversion: people just don't want to lose hard-earned followers and clout. Of course, the truth is that it's already gone...
I unfollow people that still post there. I also won't read newsletters on Substack. There is an opportunity cost to staying on toxic and harmful platforms.
Exactly. It's a whole intersection of cognitive biases, really: sunk cost, obviously, but also optimism bias, status quo, confirmation, metric overfocus, loss aversion... Btw, the above arguments, plus what to do about it, here: myhub.ai/items/x-stra...