So, if Ford pays $1 per click on an ad shown on the Toronto Star

That's the root cause no? why does it has to go through Google or Meta? If Ford paid google and Toronto Star give google ad space for ad revenue split, everything is in the contract. There is no law to prevent traditional media to have their own union ad organization right? Or at very least, Toronto can refuse and run their own ad space selling like old paper times. If say, Ford can't do it the old way like on paper, why is that? Toronto Star don't have enough technical people to handle online ad? don't know how to do ad pricing and conversion tracking? don't know how to do targeted ads? Those aren't google's fault, if traditional media wants to save money on upgrade their ad technology and backend, they will ended up forking money and purchase what others provided.

used to have content that was in such high demand

That's also not google's problem, it's the industry's problem. Like theaters/cable tv fighting for survival against streaming, brick and mortar fighting against Amazon, people only want to spend time or money on things they feel justified.

most communities become echo-chambers

If you go to nvidia community and ask what AMD card is better, then yeah, that's sort of stupid. In my example, my question or intention is to ask directly in the game's community. ie. if you ask which monitor might be best in "Home Theater" vs in "CS:GO" community, you would get totally different answer. Which is exactly what should happen for specific "review" for certain target audience. But we only get generic reviews that covers some talk points but not have actual feedbacks. So if I want to have best performance for say, Street Fighter, than I go ask in that community for best setup. Compare to spend hours and hours on review sites, you can quickly get a couple candidates for building/upgrading your PC/setup.

Lastly, say, if people go through say, fine art school, should we protect their job opportunity? Or people that have management degree they should get management jobs? Where are those shoe fixing/tailor made clothing jobs? The entire world is moving target, "used to be" is not a proper excuse to put a bad legislation that might actually back fire and damage the industry in the end.