I like this take. There's a book called "Games people play" by E. Berne that changed how I think about things like this. It talks about how people on a biological level need to interact with others and how they'll unconsciously repeat a script (game) with predictable roles and results to accomplish that. The main insight is that these games don't necessarily need to have a positive outcome - people still get something out of it. So it gets repeated, to the puzzlement of any observers and sometimes even the participants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)