Pretty much all the "stakeholders" are from the "domain industry", so it's pretty obvious what their "consensus" would be. You're right that it's technically not a money grab by ICANN, but somebody is planning to make money and we've seen that people who work at ICANN can also profit from the revolving door.
ICANN itself has no vested interest in this other than executing its policies, and if the consensus policy had ended up being "no new gTLDs, there are enough" then it wouldn't have embarked on this program.