Imo almost all of marketing can be considered dark patterns. And when your competition uses dark patterns, if you don’t use it you simply don’t gain users.

I’m reminded of a Veritasium video on clickbait (too lazy to link it right now but should be easy to find). They talk about how there’s a balance between marketing (and furthermore, manipulative marketing) and reach. If you believe the user will benefit from your service, then maybe it’s worth a bit of manipulative marketing, just to get them to enter the door. It’s a tricky balance.