The point is the effort to pay the creator directly, disintermediating the publisher. The point is not that the writers are abandoning the publishers: it's that the publishers—by moving to the subscription model by erecting paywalls—while also seeking revenue through interoperation arrangement with the platform companies pillaged their relationships with the people who did the reporting, writing and editing. The journalists, on the other hand, need what I said in the 20th century 21st century creators would need: a sustainable audience, that is, a readership that will voluntarily pay what the creator needs in order to make what they both value in the way the journalists want. This is what I meant in the conclusion of Anarchism Triumphant in 1999 in suggesting that music and journalism would be next affected by the changes in political economy resulting from the shift to zero marginal cost goods.

Despite the big industrial problems of making and distributing press artifacts in the pre-digital world, these are now zero marginal cost items made by a small number of people: reporters and editors have always been the tiniest fraction of the labor force of a newspaper. That means direct payments to creators are efficient for both authors and readers. That stays true when they assemble into co-ops at any scale.

I think your best route to improvement is to cut the descriptive material moderately hard: we can assume that your readers know the terrain, and there are plenty of things you can cite to for the detail, including Anna Wiener's excellent piece this month in The New Yorker. That gives you more room for analysis, so that instead of ending with a rhetorical shrug you can deliver more for the readers.