To add a thought on tackling the listed faults:

1. I suspect the NPV problem may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem (or at least one that would literally take a global paradigm shift in how all societies are structured to do so). This seems outside of Wikipedia's control. Attempting any draconian measures to tackle it might have negative knock-on effects on many of the other assets that give Wikipedia it's value.

2. The spending problem, as I said, is subjective & might simply be a case of efficiency being incompatible with an organisational culture that produces such a miraculous thing. I honestly suspect the opposite is true: I personally think the overspends are indicative of organisational disfunction that could seriously hurt the project in the longer term, but that's pure gut feeling on my part, based on nothing of substance. Who knows.

3. The increasing difficulty in contributing (80% of edits coming from 1% of editors) on the other hand is - imo - a potentially terminal problem & one that needs to be addressed urgently if we want to keep this resource alive.

In the past, Wikipedia vandalism was a rite-of-passage of school & college kids. This obviously needs counter-measures but it really feels like today's Wikipedia has gone so far in the opposite direction as to entirely dissuade new contributors. Old Wikipedia used to be filled with User: namespaced subpages with long form essays on the ever running debate between deletionism & inclusionism. In today's Wikipedia, the inclusionists have emigrated, tired of battle, & the remaining deletionists bravely prevent any budding new contributor from having a positive welcoming community experience by quickly auto-deleting their WIP stubs or moving them into esoteric red-taped namespaced processes nobody knows how to navigate. It's a deeply unwelcoming environment for new users, especially young people. I'd love to see an age profile of the population of frequent editors.

It's staggering how many articles get deleted despite having a dozen citations and at least some level of notability.

Even more concerning is that the deletion "consensus" is often formed by just half a dozen people who almost always cast a deletion vote.

I pop into AFD discussions occasionally and try to put my thumb on the scale but always end up disappointed with the results.

Someone should make a "Deleted From Wikipedia" website composed of nothing but Wikipedia articles that were deleted due to supposedly insufficient coverage/notability.

I’ve had a similar experience. I’ve edited Wikipedia pages for ages. I was able to create Wikipedia pages a while ago. Recently, I tried to create a page (“quantity controls”, a less well known relative of price controls in economics) and it got deleted for bullshit reasons.