Given the absolutely ridiculous amount of content that is ad-funded, I very much disagree. All of my preferred youtubers and streamers would immediately be without livelihood.
Same is probably true for a whole lot of news websites.
Although I think your point is correct, I don't think that this program's failure is evidence for it. I give cash money to numerous small creators, but there's absolutely no way that I would have used the Google Contributer program to do it. That requires more trust in Google than I can muster.