I just want to point out that these systems you mention are all changeable within the larger democratic/market system without a revolution. It might be hard, but lots of things are hard and still get done.
Was there some point in history when each professor only taught one PhD student, or did each professor teach 2 students and the number of universities doubled every 5 years?
Similarly, for how long have the number of lawyers been exponentially growing? Shakespeare wrote "let's kill all the lawyers" in 1591, and fortunately people didn't take that suggestion seriously, so presumably we've had 400 years of exponential growth.
If there was one lawyer in 1591, and it takes 10 years for a junior to become a senior lawyer and start training the next generation, then there should be 2^40 lawyers right now. (That assumes that each lawyer lives forever, so the actual number won't be over one trillion, but still).
Take a law firm, or most any similar hierarchical structure. You have someone at the top making the big bucks, with x junior's under them who all want to be at the top one day earning the big bucks. Once trained and experienced, most eventually move up. Maybe the same law firm, maybe they start their own. They then get x juniors to train under them, who rise up and who then get x juniors, who rise up, etc. At some point, you have more than enough lawyers and can't continue growing exponentially and expect the same level of prestige and compensation. Market saturation. But, we keep on going anyway, because that's how we've been collectively trained and it's ingrained in everything. Truly systemic to the point we are blind to it and wonder what's wrong. We've built a system of many systems all with an N+1 query problem and trying to come up with workarounds instead of fixing the poorly designed query in order to become performant again.