I am the case study for your failure list, so here is what actually happened rather than the summary.
Replaced the feed with a chess app. First fortnight: excellent, felt clever. Second month: I was playing three-minute games in a two-minute gap and arriving at things distracted and slightly annoyed, which the feed never did to me. Then I noticed I had started opening it while walking.
The mechanism you named is right but I would sharpen it. The problem was not that chess is infinite; a game does end. The problem is that it produced a result I cared about, so it created a reason to continue that a feed never quite manages. I was more captured by the thing I chose than by the thing I was escaping.
Now: a book, same as everyone here, and the boring conclusion is that it works.