I do not see OP stating that "useful" and "profitable" are mutually exclusive. I think it is widely understood that there is "usefulness" that is not satisfied by profit driven organisations, that is why we have non-profits and public institutions.

Call me cynical, but most non-profits seem to be more interested in paying salaries and fundraising than in the actual thing they're supposed to be "about".

And public institutions may serve a useful function, but again seem to be mostly about civil service powerbroking and providing extremely safe employment.

Fine, I'll call you cynical... ;P

There are certainly (often larger) nonprofits with a tendency of overpaying their leadership and/or pushing policies favored by their corporate funders. I would in this context however not conflate "most visible" (ie largest advertising budgets) with "most". Most nonprofits I have worked with are ran and operated by hardworking people on minimal budgets.

Note that he didn't say overpaying, just paying. It is true that in all organisations (including those associations), as time passes, professionalisation progresses, headcount raises, administrative and secondary tasks develop; and self-preservation, self-replication become a goal of its own. There is a whole range of people (I don't mean leaders or managers, but bottom/middle people) who make a career in all those non-profits, para-public and semi-public associations (all of them living mostly from subsidies), hoping from one to another. At least it goes like that in my country, it has developed a lot in the last 30 years.