As I said in the comment to that video, simply because something increases the spread, does not mean it is ultimately good. Sure, for now you are spreading information to more people, but then you subtly become driven by the need to have even more engagement, and all of a sudden not only cover, but content suffers as well. And soon all you have is react videos. Easy to produce, good engagement, no substance.
There is also a question of quality of those viewers. Your ball dropping from a dam thumbnail will attract typical TikTok viewer, and the part of the video that is interesting to them will get on to TikTok anyway. And most of them are not interested in underlying physical effect. So in a way, you are disappointing a lot of viewers by baiting them into watching content they are not interested in, they just clicked on something that looks like stuff they usually watch.
In that sense, retention is a way better metric than number of views. Did those 2M people watch the whole video?
I personally against clickbait, and make conscious effort to not click on videos like that, which sometimes is hard, but not that impossible.
Also, going to videos from RSS, I'm so happy that I don't see any of the thumbnails.