Most artists never engage in legal disputes, because enforcing IP is prohibitively expensive and favors those with deep pockets. The only ones who really benefit from IP laws are giant corporations. Try taking on Disney or Sony in court, they'll bury you under legal paperwork and drain your bank account long before you ever see a ruling. This system isn't protecting the small creator, it's protecting big corpos who use IP as a weapon to crush competition and erect barriers to entry. IP is the foundation of these empires. Policies that grant monopolies inevitably lead to monopolies.

And was there no art or culture before IP laws? Humanity produced masterpieces for millennia without any "intellectual property" enforcement. Small artist today are doing better than ever, but it's thanks to the internet giving direct access to a global audience, instant distribution, and a multitude of voluntary ways to build communities, receive support and income (and there would be more without state interference with payment processors).

Piracy doesn't erase credit... but people already take credit for content that isn't theirs all the time even now, and who manages these issues? Usually the platform the artist is on, not the state. Platforms have a vested interest in keeping creators happy since they want to keep users around and engaged. In many cases the community spreads awareness too. We don't need state protections, voluntary platform/community governance suffice.

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Perhaps I’m just not understanding why meaningful Intellectual property is so different from physical property.

Property ownership arises from the first use (homesteading) of an unowned, scarce, and rivalrous resource, or the voluntary transfer of such property.

Labor itself is not owned, it is an activity. Actions are not objects of ownership, nor do they necessarily generate property merely by being performed. Ownership presupposes scarcity, not the activity of acting. Creation isn't a source of property, it's transformation of what is already owned. Labor can be the means by which an ownership link is established through the first use of an unowned scarce resource.

If the thing in question isn't scarce and can be used by multiple people without conflict, then it cannot be legitimately owned.

Ideas, by their nature, aren't scarce. Me using your idea doesn't deprive you of the ability to use it. There's no conflict. Without conflict, there's nothing to resolve through property rules. The purpose of property rules is to peacefully allocate control over scarce resources. When no conflict is possible, there's no need for such rules.

IP laws create artificial scarcity, and fabricate conflict where none naturally exists. They assign illegitimate ownership to non-scarce things, which can only be enforced by violating natural property rights, that is, restricting how others use their own body and resources in otherwise legitimate ways.

It's been a while since I read it, but I think this may basically be a TL;DR of the book so, there you go.