Turn your apple metaphor around.

You grow an apple. You plant the seeds and scare off pests for like 12 years and then harvest your first apple.

Apples are scarce resources. You are very much entitled to compensation when selling the apple.

However, despite all the labor, if you could magically copy the apple, feeding the entire human race an infinite amount of apples forever, you would be pretty much morally obligated to do it. Like you wouldnt be faulted for pursuing the value of your labor once, but the idea that you would restrict the flow of apples, arbitrarily, just to try and get the value of your labor for each of an infinite amount of apples is absurd. To further imply that someone was stealing if they stole a copied apple is laughable. Really, any of your infinite apples that rots away in storage rather than finding its way to a hungry person is stealing from the hungry person.

What matters, is scarcity. Non scarce resources really shouldnt follow the same rules as scarce ones.

To add to this in some other direction, I have often thought that the people who have been "stolen" from... should just "get even" by making use of the LLM for their own profit in some way

They helped build an incredible tool that they should benefit from, so go ahead and reap the benefits, right?

What do you do for a living?