Hard to say. People certainly seem pretty motivated (and better equipped than 10-20 years ago) to create content for money. It just feels like there is less whimsical, fun expenditure of effort.
A lot of what is being created is fairly derivative though, it's often more like a grift than an act of innovation. Actually coming up with something new damn near requires a fair bit of cognitive surplus.
Yeah, Kevin Munger's book skillfully dissects what he calls "The YouTube Apparatus" [0]
The creators aren't really tuning their output based on consumer feedback, they're actually optimizing for the platform's metrics, so it's the (algorithmic) machine incentivizing humans to essentially feed it money.