Because you're arbitrarily restricting yourself to old versions of tools and software. The idea is you don't want unexpected conflicts to bring down your system. But, what that means is when you do go to upgrade on something like a server, you would test the whole thing on the new version, and then migrate. That's not how people use desktops. You just feel like one day upgrading from 20.04 to 20.10, and then get a massive burst of differences. It's really hard to pin down what specifically goes wrong when something does.
So unless you have a staging environment for your desktop where you test the new version before migrating, then what is the purpose of running old versions of stuff?
What does paying for anything have to do with what we're talking about here. They're ingesting freely available content, that anyone with a web browser could read
I don't see how that's relevant. A company can pay someone to read copyrighted work, learn from it, and then perform a task for the benefit of the company related to the learning.
I don't mean control from the perspective of someone posting data. I mean from the perspective of the server owner.