"Understanding these precursor conditions reveals that creative content stagnation wasn’t an unexpected development but the logical endpoint of policy choices, technological implementations, and market dynamics that prioritized short-term engagement and revenue optimization over long-term creative sustainability. The “writing on the wall” was visible to industry observers by 2017, but the systemic nature of these changes made them difficult for individual creators or even individual platforms to resist. Only by recognizing how these structural forces interconnected can we understand both how creative stagnation became inevitable and what systematic changes would be necessary to reverse it."