Have you written anything? Have you composed or recorded a song? Have you drawn or painted a picture? Taken an artistic photo? Even written some source code?

Yes I have, yes I have, yes I have, yes I have, and yes I have.

And yes, I'm thinking about this from the point of view of a creator. It's fucking difficult to make ends meet. Talk to any artist that hasn't managed to get a salaried job as an artist (you have to be really, I mean really good at what you do) or gotten lucky enough to make it big. They're saving money anywhere they can. They're working second and third jobs. Honestly, on average, artists are the poorest people I know. Despite copyright protection being strong (put the AI thing aside for a minute, since it's a fairly new problem). The lab results are in. It doesn't work.

You know what they would like? To focus on their art, and not their financial issues. Oh, and many would like to not worry about the legal grey area/hellhole when it comes to remixing or rearranging others' work. I've made an arrangement for a song I was fascinated with, but I haven't released it, partly because I don't want to deal with all the legal BS.

This was meant to be a real solution to a real problem at the dawn of industrialization; how can the person who writes a story compete with a person who owns a printing press?

You're mixing up your history here. Copyright is much, much newer than the printing press. And even if you take that assumption, that calculation has changed, since again there's next to no cost to making copies anymore. So now, the companies have used copyright to become gatekeepers while also keeping as much of the profit as humanly possible.

Why is the prescription a society where creative people are the only ones who can't capitalize on their creations?

...except they can. There are plenty of media creators that get their audience to sponsor them, to varying degrees of success.

But honestly, if there's no worry about food insecurity or housing insecurity, do you want to create art or just profit from it?

I'm not going to go into the slippery slope tirade at the end except to say this: look at how filthy rich companies like Disney, Sony, etc. are. They are that ridiculously rich because of copyright. Is that really what you want?