PBS is fortunate that Disney/Nickelodeon are so egregiously bad they make anybody else look good. Shit, even the toy-shilling 'saturday morning' cartoons of the 80s weren't as bad.
The exploitative intent was certainly present back then, but they weren't as good at it as they are today. The degenerate science of advertising to children has only grown more advanced.
This is something I've been puzzling about for a while. Marketing is evolving every generation but human perception/brains is not. People get PhDs in this stuff. We don't seem to be building better defenses, either biologically or culturally, against the ever improving marketers. There's no telling what the end result will be, but I'm not looking forward to finding out.