Really excellent job on this one! I really love the song choices (I'm a big Louie Zong fan, and hello world is perfect for the end) and the sound in general. I also really love how expressive you made Max despite him having such a simple visual design. The last thing I was expecting from this prompt was a narrative game, but I'm really glad you took this direction!
As far as critique goes, I think one might be to change the name so that the tone of the game isn't spoiled (if that's something you care about). I knew this was gonna be pretty meta just from the title alone (although I do really like the title, it's what made me click on it in the first place, so I'm kinda conflicted on this point). There's also some issues with food spawning when you press the button a bunch of times. I wouldn't really want to add a ton mechanically to the game, since I think its simplicity is part of its charm, and also it supports the point you're making. However, I think one little unexplored part of the weird world of virtual pets is the whole "or else" of raising a virtual pet. A lot of games will tell you like, "oh make sure you do this, or else this will happen", and the player doesn't want anything bad to happen to their pet, so they do whatever menial task is required. It'd be cool to make the player feel worried about Max's wellbeing right before he goes on a little rant about how absurd it is to worry about the health of a computer program.