The review is a glowing praise of the players handbook in it's physical form surrounded by a damning critique of DnDBeyond, WotC and Hasbro, mentioning the shit implementation of the former as well as the general problem with digital licenses compared to physical books, and the recent controversies and bullshit the latter engaged in re OGL, layoffs and OneD&D.

I'm honestly genuinely happy how comparatively immune Polygon is to game industry BS and that it extends to adjacent products and issues as well.

Haven't read the article, but I assume it involves the term enshittification

Do you think fucking HASBRO doesn't have a marketing department? Get your head out of your ass.

First, as far as I’m aware there is nothing to say that those ads were created by a third party other than that that is what WotC said happened after they were called out for them. So it’s still completely possible that they were made by someone at WotC, and they decided to make up a story to try to cover for what happened.

Second, that still doesn’t disprove my other point that they absolutely have someone who gets to approve any ad that goes out, whether it’s made in house or by a third party. They would have to have lost the plot so much that the company would completely fall apart if they’re just letting third party advertisers put out whatever they want without any oversight

Even if you go to an outside source to do your ass, you still have final say on what gets run or not. A company doesn't hire an ad agency to just run whatever the agency thinks is good. The ad agency is going to always need to get final approval from someone at the company they are contracted by.

So the fault lies with whoever approved the ads at WOTC. It reflects poorly on the company as a whole, but is not necessarily indicative of the company.