Sure, but I’d wager it goes beyond the singular manifestation of power as money. Plenty of other manifestations, and all lead to similar places.

At this point, anything remotely near bare-metal material reality triggers such a cognitive dissonance in a lot of folks, on account of all of the bs they have in their heads, that all of that bare-metal material reality is discarded as too painful.

This kind of stuff never happens overnight. It happens slowly, incrementally, and the people are never mad enough at too much sudden change to be motivated enough to do anything. People should feel good about the imposition of boundaries, and it helps that for the average user, the boundaries often result in a better user experience.

Fun speculation: we are CPUs for the information systems we inhabit, like scientific method, political ideologies, etc.