I deleted them for a year, same as I did with the other apps. Came back with rules: one at a time, no swiping after 9pm, meet within a week or unmatch. It's workable like that. But the fact that I needed rules to use a dating app like a person is kind of the whole point, isn't it.

Needing rules isn't evidence the tool is bad. You need rules to drink, to spend, to eat biscuits. The question is whether the outcomes are worse, and the only large studies I know of find app-met couples are about as happy as the rest. Survivorship bias, sure. But "I needed discipline" is not "it made things worse".