Successful products are usually built from inside the system, not from outside - and then it doesn't matter if 50 people from the outside copied it, they won't get paid because they aren't the right people to begin with.

Now problem is, because people from outside usually don't know it, and believe they are relevant, they used to create the vast majority of "investment" demand for coding... and now because they ask themselves the same question as you did, they just stopped trying, and their demand is gone.