If you click on the article, spend two seconds on it, and don’t actually read it, have you actually fulfilled the marketing goals of the web site?
For one, you haven’t actually read anything, so there’s nothing to register “this is a good web site with good content and I will read their articles in the future”. No reputation bump from it.
And two, you didn’t have time to actually see the ads, that is, if you didn’t already had an ad-blocker in the first place.
The goals of clickbait don’t actually align with the goals of their profitability.