It goes without saying that they are optimizing for engagement with their platform/app and user growth, just like every last digital huckster on the internet.
To keep people hooked while making them feel that the app is working, even though they are not getting their end result.
You have it backwards. The apps aren't training the human preferences, the human preferences are training the apps. There have been a LOT of different dating app ideas, and all have been competed away except for the ones that provide users the biggest perception of optionality.
Competed away or bought and hamstrung...?
And human behavior is absolutely shaped by our environments and systems. We're quite easily manipulatable - whether we want to admit/realize it or not.
Social media literally hired human behaviorists to design their apps to make them more addicting. You're quite mistaken if you dont think apps arent engineered to drive human behavior.
Dark Patterns are very prominent and well known thing in tech UI.
https://www.google.com/search?q=dark+patterns
I mean competed away. There are a lot of dating apps out, probably a lot more than you think. Zero of them were bought out by Match before the market made them huge.