Agreed, I don't think these thought experiments are coming from nihilistic economists who want to toss it out completely, but just trying to safeguard against w

Agreed, I don't think these thought experiments are coming from nihilistic economists who want to toss it out completely, but just trying to safeguard against ways it might be systematically biased, or identify ways we could improve its utility. I think the theoretical critiques get refined down several layers and end up leading to to practical shifts, like the reweighting of intellectual property in 2013. That must have been a hard trade off between consistency with earlier GDP measures and accuracy (read: more enduring consistency for coming decades, facing shifts in the economy).