I agree with your conclusion, but it looks like our views of “what’s causing it” are exact opposites. We made it 30,000 years with creators having “just the pride of creation”. I’m deeply skeptical that the IP monetization regime of the past 100 years is the natural state of things.

> We made it 30,000 years with creators having “just the pride of creation”.

The pride of creation and either someone who funded their work or income generated by their work. I can think of quite a few creators who died impoverished and only became famous after their death but I am not aware of any creator who lived well on "just the pride of creation".

We made it 30,000 years without AI scrapers being able to forcibly extract money from creators’ wallets by using swarms of bots to drive up their hosting costs.

we made it 30,000 years with the best known creators having guilds, royal patronage, or inheritances.