Let’s not forget that Unity recently merged with a malware company, so borderline-illegal predation is their entire business strategy.

No, they merged with an advertising company - you know, the same companies with which they're close enough to have plugins for. It's about business; who you talk to, who you have deals with.

I would never call such horrifically predatory tactics “good business sense.” It’s abuse of market position and should draw the ire of antitrust regulators, as well as make their product a major business risk for any new projects.

It is good business sense. The engine has relatively little value, it's about what software stacks it integrates with, plus the ease of use for making exports to the two platforms that matter (Android and iOS). There's a reason Unreal doesn't even exist in this space, even though it's technically capable of running on these devices.

Again, this is not the industry you're thinking of - it's the mobile industry, which is less about game development and more about having millions in your war-chest (usually from a few VCs) that you can spend on your marketing budget. If you can't market, you're dead in the water.

The entire industry is built around ads in games and traditional social media.

Things like this will stop happening if:

A) People become less susceptible to predatory marketing.

B) Another game engine developer decides to undercut Unity while at the same time offering similar platform targets and SDK integrations.

(There's also a thing to be said about hiring, where all new mobile-game devs learn Unity - as it's become the de-facto standard for getting a job in this industry. Any new player would need some big names to adopt them first to make a push for people to learn the tools, not hobbyists.)

Barring that nothing will change.

Also, there really aren't "new" projects in this field - you rarely see scrappy upstarts succeeding in the mobile space, just jaded veterans undercutting their old studios by offering their VCs (or new, hungrier VCs) a bigger cut of the pie. Also, studios with private chefs, massive salaries, and cult-y work spaces that look like adult playgrounds.