> As for your analogy, I'd say it's closer to paying someone to help you find something obscure and hard to find on Google.
That's exactly what google dorks were. Google started out as a great search engine, but it's also a tool and 'Google Fu' was a real thing. Anyone could easily find song lyrics and news articles. It took effort (time and skill) to understand how google worked and how to format searches to get the results you were interested in for many obscure types of data. I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't have been allowed to charge for Google search terms, only that unlike today making a fast dollar wasn't anyone's first priority.
A marketplace for Google search terms might have been just as successful, but it never happened and I'd like to think we were all better off for it. Instead that information was shared freely and widely to anyone interested and it served us well for many years until Google degraded their product by no longer following their own rules and much of that became useless.
I'd argue that this is much less like paying someone to create something in photoshop (Here you give the right commands, DALL·E 2 does all the work) and much more like charging for a tutorial on how to use photoshop to achieve certain effects (You follow the right steps, photoshop does all the work). There's nothing wrong with charging for tutorials (many do and have done), and I'm glad that there are still people willing to share what they've learned without throwing up a paywall, but the rush to monetize here was shockingly fast. An entire infrastructure was put into place to support buyers, sellers, purchases, featured products, and payments before many even had a chance to try this new tool for themselves.
I see it as a reflection of how much the culture of the internet has changed. The commercialization of the web has become so pervasive that many people can't imagine an internet without a profit incentive (often expressed as some form of 'the internet couldn't exist without ads!' or 'No one would create content if they aren't getting paid to do it!'), but those of us who are older will remember a healthy and thriving internet that existed long before it was commercialized and how many useful, popular, and helpful websites and services were created and maintained without any thought given to "Yeah, but what's in it for me?" and the overall vibe on the internet was about sharing (or more cynically, showing off) vs making money.