Yeah.
Hence most that "make it" do it through external links, like sponsors, OnlyFans, merch, blog/newsletter subscriptions and such.
Yet the platforms are trying to squash that. Just the other day, I witnessed the official YouTube Android TV app skip a video's sponsor.

One interesting thing about the Chinese “AI Tigers” is the lack of Tech Bro evangelism.
They see their models as tools. Not black box magic oracles, not human replacements. And they train/structure/productize them and such.
Big Tech is making this really hard, though.
In the business world, there’s a lot of paranoia about using Chinese LLM weights. Which is totally bogus, but also understandably hard to explain.
And OpenAI and such are working overtime to lock customers in. See: iOS being ChatGPT-only; no “pick your own API.” Or Disney using Sora when they should really be rolling their own finetune.