I think this is a big problem even without evil choices. I really want to see more games explore things happening because you DIDN'T accept someone's quest. Maybe something bad happens to them, or perhaps they resent you for turning them down and spread bad rumors about you.
Sadly like you said most of the time the choice in taking a quest is actually: do you want more content, or not? Not much of a choice at all.
I think that evil paths in games are often the least interesting, too. Usually it just means you kill everyone and/or fuck people over for no good reason. Like you said there's no depth. You almost never have to face any growing consequences for your actions.
Real evil is usually greed and fear weaponized to enrich and empower oneself. It's self-interested and often delusional, but to that person they are still the hero of their story.
I've always been the type of player who, when the game says "there's no way we can beat them all, we should sneak past", decides "let's test that theory".
Whatever they were designed for, they are currently being sold as the solution to nearly every problem. You can't expect a layperson to look further than that, and it's completely reasonable to judge what they do against the claims being used to sell them.
You can blame the marketing departments, but that original purpose you mention is no longer a major talking point (even if it should be).
No one can answer this question with anything but speculation. If you enjoy the speculation that's fine, but just remember that no one here has a crystal ball and what they say is just a guess rooted in their own biases and lifestyle, no matter how well thought out it sounds.
I used to be the type to want to consider a variety of opinions and play devil's advocate. The last decade has radicalized me into being much more staunchly progressive. Stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything.
It's an easy trap to fall into if you're a generally open minded person I think. I didn't want to follow the herd, and I didn't want to take things at face value. Those aren't bad ideals, but when living in a corrupt and dishonest world it basically means giving too much space to people who aren't worth it.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I would imagine tons of bot accounts being spun up just to wait for a bit would also be suspicious, right? But in that case they could be pruned before they did anything. I'm not a moderator, so don't take anything I say as fact.
I think account age would be more useful than karma. Karma is just a game-able system, but I could see a very short age requirement being useful eventually if a lot of spam starts to happen. I don't think we're there yet, though.
A lot of apps start on iOS because they have the majority of the mobile market in the US.