Filtering the crap is now orthogonal to the concern that, historically, information dissemination has been tied to physical scarcity. Those concerns ran together because it cost money to publish something. It doesn't now.

We can come up with new models that compensate creators more directly. We can also come up with models that don't involve effectively killing any ability to build upon existing culture in the time-scale of a human life.

What came before isn't how it has to be, except that the interest that profit from the current system want it to remain so.