that one on Friends was not Fran Drescher, it was Maggie Wheeler

Oh, definitely. However I'm not so sure that these are the low quality comments they're talking about. I believe it's the ones that are being posted just to get that quick upvote in order to feel more validated.

In my experience the only ones caring about engagement scores are advertisers. If you agree with a post/comment you don't actually have to press any button (upvote, like, heart, etc) or even reply to it. We've been conditioned to do it because they have found a way to profit off of our "uh huh" and "yeah that's right". I'm not suggesting it's all bad, I'm trying to put it into context.

I think this is a symptom of having a scoring system for comments. If you gamify your social interactions, people will try to play the game (meaning low quality comments, dad jokes, or anything that will grant them easy votes) instead of having actual discourse.