I think it’s also not too far from what most businesses end up doing, it just takes slightly longer to get there. See enshitification.
But zoom out and what you had was just an enormous machine converting human ambition into noise. Affiliate spam // dropshipped junk // ebooks about passive income // courses about courses. An entire layer of the internet that was nothing but confident-sounding bullshit produced by people who had optimized for everything except making something worth buying.
Source: The “Passive Income” trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs