Most people writing scientific literature are not English majors nor even great communicators, their primary competencies are elsewhere. Expecting everyone to write literature is just odd & reductive.

Yes, it helps to be a good writer, but the primary objective for science papers is to convey information; that it is well written or enjoyable is a nice bonus but not essential.

All to transport one person by themselves from home to office and back.

Eating apple, cooking apple, cider apple, pig feed?

Granny Smith, Honeycrisp, Red Delicious? All apples, wildly different, all common. Even within the more commercially available variants there are significant differences: https://www.jessicagavin.com/types-of-apples/

Heck, just for cooking apples there are huge number of different varieties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_apple

Yea, "apple" as an idea doesn't really express anything concrete without lots more context.

And without more context, Apple may even mean something that isn't even a fruit, but still popular: www.apple.com

Sure, we're reducing the cost of idea -> prototype to near zero (well, as long as tokens are free or nearly free), but that just means we now have mountains of throw away code, within which there may a gem or two.

Nothing yet has replaced the curating of ideas that good teams do as a matter of course.

We don't allow under 18s to vote, so clearly some age restrictions are legitimate.

Aviation learned this the hard way, that automation should be adapted to how humans actually work and not on how we wish we worked.

Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any value anything in return.

If they didn't do any of this that combination of letters doesn't disappear, it just goes back to being available from the primary registrars.

The squatters are just vacuuming up some of the profit off people that would/could use that combination of letters to actually provide a service.

I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.

Nevertheless automatic typesetting and formatting have existed for decades! TeX and LaTeX are ancient and produce better looking results than any book I've ever read on any of my ereaders, and those aren't the only tools in this space.

Whatever people are paying for such "production" seems wasted.

What on earth are all the middlemen between book being authored and it being sold to a customer that add so much overhead that the cost of printing and logistics disappears in the noise???

To the public this becomes like the risk of being hit by lightning or being in a car accident, just background noise we avoid thinking about as much as possible. It is just the cost of living in this economy.

But lots of presentations, including this one I think, are merely used as a means of conveying information (yeah, not my favorite way of doing so, but being a contrarian doesn't do anybody's career any good), and those are indeed intended to be read and need to have explicitly all the information that you otherwise would be speaking and addressing.