[onion2k]

As a user, I'm fine with Google counteracting this.

The problem there is that "optimizing for clickbaitness" means "making the titles as appealing to click on as possible when they're displayed in search pages". Google deliberately making them less appealing to click on means Google are reducing the effectiveness of organic search results, and that favors adverts instead.

In other words, what you are saying is that you believe it's valid for Google to rewrite website content to make search page adverts more appealing than the actual search results.

That is very hard to justify. If Google wanted to 'punish' sites for being too clickbaity then they should drop that site's position in the search rankings. Ranking it highly but rewriting the title to be something worse (or 'less clickbaity') is a massive abuse of their search market position to favor their ad business.