Realized I didn't address your concern, I have still seen many creatives able to profit without strong protections. The gaming industry often has controversy with its drm but even drm free releases are continuously able to make large sales volumes and drm has been shown in that EU study from 2015ish to not actually protect sales.

Piracy is not nearly at the same scale as what would happen if copyright was scrapped. Piracy requires you to go to shady websites to get illegal copies of games/movies/tv series. That is enough of a disincentive for most people that just buying copies of the games is easier.

But if it were legal to distribute copies, these websites wouldn't need to operate in the shadows, switching domain names constantly to evade law enforcement. Instead, these websites could become as easy-to-use as Steam, but instead of paying the creators of the games they could just take 100% of the revenues for themself.

There would be an explosion in what we would call "piracy" today, but what would just be called downloading games if copyright were scrapped, because the barrier to entry for doing so could be made so much lower.

I am not a fan of intellectual property and copyright enforcement (at least the weaponisation of them). But scrapping IP and copyright entirely would be disastrous. I prefer the idea of reducing the amount of time someone can hold IP/copyright for, or additional punishment for patent trolls, or other measures to alleviate the concerns of IP/copyright without destroying R&D and digital work.