Netflix’s Media Production Suite

The tech is cool, but it seems like the main result of having such a pipeline is that Netflix has been able to produce an incredible amount of low-effort schlock that mostly lacks soul and artistic merit.

Are you serious? Have you watched Adolescence? It's got more soul and artistic merit than practically anything else I've ever seen. And that was just last week.

Maid? The Queen's Gambit? Baby Reindeer? The Crown? Ripley? BoJack Horseman?

Sure they make a lot of schlock too, because they're a business and that's what most of their audience wants.

But I don't see how you could possibly criticize them for that when they continue to put out some pretty astonishingly artistic and soulful stuff.

You don't need this pipeline to produce 6 shows over a decade. Said another way, they almost certainly would not have bothered to build this system if the purpose was mainly to produce the shows you mention. The reason these systems exist is to enable the creation of hundreds or thousands of productions.