Exactly. Academic publishers especially have slashed all the editorial work they traditionally did and now contribute nothing. Unless you want a shitty $150 printing of a book. They are utterly parasitic on other people's money: grants, libraries, university salaries (and the weight of a book publication in promotions)...

When I was in grad school I got a thousand dollars or so to copyedit and typeset a prof's book. He had to pay for it out of his grant. The publisher (Springer) literally did nothing.

This situation was neither inevitable or accidental. I forget a source, but a few decades ago some business types realized academic publishing was a captive market, so bought up a bunch of presses and started exploiting it more and more.