You seem to be ignoring the large number of people who seem to be interested in a large exit, who will look for ANYTHING a target audience will pay for and do i

You seem to be ignoring the large number of people who seem to be interested in a large exit, who will look for ANYTHING a target audience will pay for and do it to scale, because. And the other group of people who will assist those in power to maintain it, because trickle down. You can open your original sentence out to "Can't these <insert any potentially harmful project> folks find some other interesting thing to work on?" As long as there is some sort of incentive on the other end, someone will be interested.