A classic dilemma. Collegial vs commercial ecosystems. Amateur sports face this. You can't really make a living running ultra marathons, which makes it somewhat exclusive, but if there was a lot of money to be made the whole experience would change and not always for the better.

I'm sure there would still be plenty of advertising based search engines for them to advertise their content in. See also the high street vs library analogy - if you had great public libraries you wouldn't be putting shopkeepers out of business.

Is it really a problem though? Was there a lack of content in the times before the commercial Internet (or the Internet itself really.. in the time of BBSes)?

And there are things like Patreon as well..

Yes. That’s why piracy was a big draw for BBSes.