I mostly agree with your rant, but I counter your example of sticking $100 bills up in your front yard as "art".
There are many people who spend hundreds or thousands (or more) sticking up outrageous displays for halloween or xmas lights in their front yard, expecting no more payoff than watching people be delighted as they pass by. That's a great and admirable motivation. Even if it's largely done just to show Bob down the street how lame he is and how you can gather a bigger crowd than him - that's less great but still OK in my opinion.
I admit that most of those displays are only able to be paid for because the homeowner is getting that $5k/week at their big tech job or their finance job or whatever. Same as how Burningman's "free" art mostly couldn't exist without Bay Area tech millionaires funding it as they cosplay being an Artist.
The key difference is that holiday decorations aren't as fungible as $100 bills. People can (and do) steal stuff out of peoples yards (and packages on their porches) and then resell that stuff for cash. The reality is that people with poor morality/integrity will always see self enrichment at the expense of others.
As I mentioned to another commenter, FOSS licenses take away (steal) a right that creators have to arbitrate giving away their work. You can write software, keep it licensed, and give 'no cost' licenses to people who just want to use it for their fun stuff, but when someone wants to use it in a product, and it is code they would have had to hire someone to write otherwise, I think it is more reasonable for them to pay the creator the equivalent cost (at least). So if something would take a week to write, what is 40 hrs of wages you would accept to write that code? Let's say its $100/hr that is $4,000. So for a one time payment of $4,000 you can license your code for them to use in their commercial product which will make them, presumably, much much more than $4,000 over its lifetime. But with FOSS licenses, you can't do that. You can sue them (it's expensive) and after suing them the only compensation you can expect is that they publish their source code? Now the FOSS license has stolen not only your creative work, but your time you could have used to write more software, and the monetary expense of hiring lawyers. As a result FOSS authors don't have a lot to gain by suing scofflaws, the scofflaws know that and so they steal the value safe in the knowledge that it will be unlikely to cost them anything.
There are many people who spend hundreds or thousands (or more) sticking up outrageous displays for halloween or xmas lights in their front yard, expecting no more payoff than watching people be delighted as they pass by. That's a great and admirable motivation. Even if it's largely done just to show Bob down the street how lame he is and how you can gather a bigger crowd than him - that's less great but still OK in my opinion.
I admit that most of those displays are only able to be paid for because the homeowner is getting that $5k/week at their big tech job or their finance job or whatever. Same as how Burningman's "free" art mostly couldn't exist without Bay Area tech millionaires funding it as they cosplay being an Artist.