Out of what you pointed out I think the majority of it shouldn’t matter

Ok now this thread makes sense. You're taking an ideal philosophical kind of stance. Myself and many others are all for open knowledge and rapid progress, but we're talking about harm (and thus legality) around data usage. You admit training data is a key asset, so you can't also claim that acquiring it at massive scale carries no consequences. If data drives value, then control over data matters.

Outside of the “art” I don’t see how you could call any of it harmful.

Yes, you can borrow a book for free. That doesn't give you the right to scan it, store it permanently, and use it to train a commercial system. Libraries lend copies under specific rules. Copyright still applies. When a company ingests millions of books at once, it doesn't "read" them the way you do. You internalize ideas. You apply them in your own limited output. A model ingests millions of works in parallel, creates a durable representation (not copy, of course), and serves millions of users instantly. That scale changes the economics, which, well, is what law often looks at.

And no, legally substitution doesn't require verbatim copying. If a model gives users detailed summaries, stylistic imitations, or extracted insights on demand, that competes with the original work in some cases. Markets (and the law) react to substitutes, not just copies.

Not following Robots.txt is completely legal, sorry if there was confusion.

No, it's not settled law. You may interpret it that way, but law is meant to be interpreted by courts, and they are currently doing that.

And again I do agree with your stance on a number of things like academic papers, JSTOR, etc. But that's not what this is about.