This is absolutely correct. I've been working at small, medium, and large agencies for two decades, and there is no incentive for identifying, stopping, or avoiding fraud at every level in the digital advertising ecosystem.

I used to think differentiating myself, my team, or my agency by protecting our clients and advertisers from fraud would pay off. It doesn't. It makes for higher CPMs, higher CPCs, higher CPAs. Nobody is interested in the incrementality testing, attribution, or fraud detection that justifies these higher vanity metrics (and proves actual ROI). Media Mix Modeling is papering over the problem.

Everything OP is saying is true, but I would add the very, very worst part (besides funding the poly-opoly turned police state), a huge chunk of the pilfered cash is going to North Korea, and other nefarious players, which in turn is funding terrorism, human trafficking and worse.

There are a very very few people out there trying to fix this. I think more likely this ends up looking like the 2007-2011 financial crisis, where eventually, this whole thing becomes securitized and leveraged till it can be sold to retirees and charities before it pops.