> One can speculate why this is so important for society, but ostensibly it is to protect the rights of Universal, Disney, etc

It is not difficult for me to speculate that it is due to people’s desire to get paid for their time and effort. The people working at Universal (Comcast) and Disney have the option of doing their own thing and trying to get people to pay for it outside of centralized platforms. That they do not seems to indicate it is not a viable option.

That is not to say anything about unnecessarily long copyright terms, that is a separate issue.