I mean, that's a general point that can be made about any area of rentier work. It's unclear to me how this is any worst than people focusing on e.g. ad optimization and data gathering for advertising (which ought to account for more than half the profit made in SV, maybe more than half the profit made in software in general, seeing how 2/5 tech giants are pure ads companies and the rest get plenty of revenue from that stream).

Which is not to say the point is correct, i.e. you can't get rid of the reniter economy and in the current regulatory environment it's bound to levitate to e.g. investing and ads.

It's just to say that, if this is a porblem you have, you'd ought to make this comment on basically every single math, statistics, ml and programming article on medium :p