but authors and filmmakers still make TONS of money.

This is an affirmation many writers would find offensive lol

The editorial sector is in deep crisis, it's really hard to live off as a writer unless you're ridiculously famous.

Same thing for the filmmaking industry, look at protest of screenwriters and actors, and to companies terrible financial sheets, and to movie theaters basically bankrupting as maybe their time is over. Also we both agree there's been a shift from movies to tv series and one of the reason is that you "buy the product piece by piece"?

Ps: funnily enough, period publication of chapters were a thing until not long ago, and still are in somewhere (for example manga in Japan)

Webnovel sites in Korea and China sell books one chapter at a time, and some of their publishers are trying to break into the Western market with the same structure (ie Wattpad bought by naver, Webnovel.com owned by Qidian). They also like using virtual currency for buying chapters. Korean and Chinese web comics are also sold this way. Publishers really like the microtransaction money no matter the industry. If they could figure out how to sell microtransactions for movies I bet they would do it.

Side note: I downloaded this chinese app for downloading region locked games on mobile and they somehow figured out how to put gacha in it. Publishers seem to do anything for money no matter how little sense it makes.

The movies industry is no better, they too try to get as much money as possible and they do for example with product placement.

If they could find a way to make you pay a few bucks more to see the protagonist on a unicorn instead of a horse you can bet they would.