Your solution is for everyone in the world to foster a degree of self-discipline they've never shown any inclination for in the past?
That doesn't sound like a scalable solution. These apps are so pervasive and their use adopted at such a young age (with a large degree of social pressure) it seems like legislation is the only way to curb these dark patterns.
Like other commentators have said these are extremely well resourced companies looking for ways to exploit human psychology at scale. It's in a walled garden, compiled app so it's you have very limited ability to modify what you're shown. End-users of apps need to be given more power over what they can be shown and if that kills companies then to me that's an acceptable tradeoff.