Music was always like this. It used to be even more like this 100 years ago. How many twelve bar blues songs use the exact same chord progression? Maybe thousands if you managed to catalog them all. Maybe hundreds with the same lick between verses. As music started being recorded you had people writing dozens and dozens of songs a day to be owned by a label. They’d find some starlet with a voice and give her a book of these songs from the basement to record on the album and market her for a few years. If anything we are reverting to this model more today, as bands are no longer in vogue as much as individual artists whose material they perform has probably 20 writers credited.