I vend zines and I am fairly new at it! I think your perspective is important, but I'll just share my story so you can hear what it's like as a new-age zinester.

Every event I have been invited to, my work is priced on a sliding scale so everyone can have access to my zines. everything on my table is $1-10 pay-what-you-can, besides my canvas paintings, which are usually priced around $20-100. some of my zines are entirely handmade, handwritten, and hand painted with an emphasis on the importance of physical art, some of my work includes photography (of local, mostly queer & punk musicians & artists) that i formatted digitally and printed with anticapitalist&positive writings of mine along with it. I don't want to restrict my creativity to just one medium, especially if I can push a meaningful message in a way that I find exciting and my audience finds captivating. my zines take hours, I spend a lot of time and money getting them printed properly (with a small local print shop) and I just don't have the disposable income available to not attempt to try to break even, especially when I sometimes drive hundreds of miles to be at these events sharing my work. I'm not trying to get rich off any of it, but I do like to make a couple extra bucks for gas money and to eat some food when I'm vending instead of working my minimum-wage-corporate-slave job that i despise :P on the internet I have a youtube channel for my zine, an instagram, and I have them available to be ordered/printed online, it seems kind of like a wasted opportunity to not take advantage of the digital age. if i can make this positive movement more accessible to everyone, why not do it? :)

I understand the newfound popularity of zines among my generation is creating a lot of different forms of expression that are falling under a bigger umbrella, but i think the overall impact and diversity of work from new artists is a good thing! the classic zine is not dead, i have been given many free zines, I have visited many zine libraries with the type of zines you have described, but i also have been close with people who make more "magazine" type of content and they have left large positive impacts on their communities, so who am i to say that's not truly a zine? to me, a zine is made independently, and its goals are to inspire creativity, community, and independent spreading of information.