Notice, how I used "attention" and not "money" or even "listens". Just look at the first and the main goalpost independent artist set for themselves. It's no longer "buy our music" or "come to our show", by now they strive to convince the audience to attempt to listen to their songs.
By this time I consider an artist that's only present in streaming services and lacks a visible way of direct distribution of their music (which includes such services as Bandcamp, for now) either an utterly mismanaged one or, again, a part of the problem†.
The only way for the artist to feel appreciated is building their loyal fan base, but if you don't want to wear the "entertainer" hat (which now equals becoming a circus monkey for the trending social media) this becomes harder and harder for a bunch of reasons:
1. Music is just not as culturally important as it was 50 years ago. 2. Live shows are in decline and dominated by cover/tribute acts. 3. As correctly mentioned in TFA, you're fighting with everything else plus everything that came before you. 4. The world is closing. Visas have always been a curse‡, but nowadays even if I jump through a myriad of hoops and get one, I can't even cross the border to the countries we usually started the tours from in a previous life. 5. The internet feels like a collapsing space too, though it's probably the most controversial opinion of mine.
There's also a problem of NNGC. At least the previous boom (blockchain) promised to make things better in some way (and it did, but underdelivered tenfold), but the current one ("AI") doesn't even do that — there's not even a positive scenario how the life of a common artist becomes better, unless "post-scarcity" truly happens (it won't).
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†: To clarify, this is about modern artists, things are a bit different when we speak about "legacy" acts that jump started their careers in a different era.
‡: Even though in case of EU most artists entering didn't care and used their tourist visas because they did not make any money anyway.