Sadly, "therapy speak" entering in to someone's life can be its own form of getting worse.
Still, I think your point is largely fair and correct. Easy to agree with the headline, in that you likely won't optimize your way to being a good person. But you can use optimization ideas to remove things that are making you not a good person. Indeed, the main optimization idea is to measure something, and then take action to move it in the direction you prefer. If what you are doing isn't moving in that direction, you aren't optimizing for it anymore.
therapy will generally recommend removing the need to optimize entirely, in order to achieve an emotional homeostasis (particularly given that the need to optimize often leads to obsessive/compulsive behavior).
If you imagine therapy as a way to condition some sort of gradient descent on emotions and awareness you can already see the problem.
The implication of your statement is you eventually reach some global optima. The reality is you become over-aware of some things and under-aware of others. This is the local optima and you've been caught in a bowl. Therapy "works" when your local optima is "good enough" for your own definition of done. However, it can often take several "bumps" out of those local optima to find it and once again you haven't really "optimized" like you are implying.
I would think the focus on optimization of emotional and awareness skills would simply lead to more, not less, anxiety. It sounds like the same problem people have with always being online and being a good "global citizen". In this example, like your example, when you feed your learning algorithm data about some war in a far off land you necessarily reduce the weight on your immediate surroundings.
Therefore, I believe it's impossible to "optimize" such things without making significant learning losses. Better to succumb to the brownian motion of life - imo.
I think you are overestimating how much an average person can change itself. I’ve seen therapy helping to surmount some hurdles, but completely changing a person, in a positive way, rarely. Again keyword: average.
