This is mostly just due to how nonprofits work. If you have excess revenue, you can’t return it to shareholders so you might as well spend it on mission-oriented activities.
Second, of course zero-margin processes have an economic role. That is what market efficiency looks like. The entire point of competition is to produce these economic processes. The american brain can't fathom getting their money's worth lol
What are you saying here? Like, how are you distinguishing individual charity from the thing "worth doing collectively"? Presumably you don't consider individuals voluntarily giving and thus voluntarily organizing insofar as they coordinate to be the same as collective action, so I can't help but wonder which part is different, and I worry it's the voluntary bit....