I don't think you're off base here, and I think it's probably tied to influencer culture and seeing that bleed into fandom spaces (at last - it took a long time, but you can't keep the Visigoths out forever). I'm less hoping that there will be pushback against this trend in fandom - for reasons I'll state in a moment - than that there will be a schism. I'm not hoping for the former because all the evidence I've seen over the last decade is that people like influencer culture and the commodification of hobbies. A lot of people say they don't, but: talk is cheap. Why do influencers stay influential? Because people opt-in to that space, keep watching their work, and sharing their work (even if to criticize it - which is also apparently a way of becoming an influencer). I think it's probably futile to hope that it will just go away as long as the internet is around and relatively wild. Even if it became more restrictive, I don't see the culture around this going away - there are plenty of influencers who dominate in authoritarian countries that try to squeeze the 'net, they're just curated by the ruling class.

But I do hope there is a schism - that if this takes over Tumblr or Pillowfort (it has a snowball's chance in hell of taking over places like DW), places for the fans like us emerge or persist in their space.