Because that hero image is exactly the graphite sketch (touched with white and gold
paint markers) of a PCB the writer wanted, and it took five seconds and five cents to produce, and it is worth more than that to no one including the human artist who did not draw it, because it is only here so people don't assume this stock website layout is broken for its absence.
That the human artist still deserves and requires paying I enthusiastically agree. I would rather that happen in a way which will demean their skills less than having to subsist on makework like this garbage would.
Throughout history, that's what artists DID. The great works only exist because of the Church or because some rich patron paid for it. And everyone else just ended up copying those for middle-class people's houses and such, because that was the Renaissance version of "Live, Laugh, Love" wall art.
Art classes go gaga today over the Clothed and Nude Majas, when the whole reason they existed was so some rich noble could have a "respectable" decoration that he could then hoist away when the party got raunchy enough and go "heh, look, she's nekkid now."
Yes. The loudly embittered ones now will be making sandwiches or something in a decade, around when today's quietly thoughtful ones really begin making themselves known to history as the precursor generation of the first great - diffusion artists? Collageurs d'inference? Oh, I'm sure it won't be anything I would come up with, anyway. But what does life look like when keeping the deep-pocketed philistines satisfied takes only two hours a week, plus the usual coffee dates or "coffee" dates or "coffee dates?"
That the human artist still deserves and requires paying I enthusiastically agree. I would rather that happen in a way which will demean their skills less than having to subsist on makework like this garbage would.