There seems to be, broadly, two aspects to getting paid --
1. Delivering something of value, something that other people are willing to pay for;
2. Negotiation, bargaining power, and the mechanics of how much and how you get paid.
A lot of the disconnect in ethics and feelings about money originates from these largely separate forces. Industries that touch and interact with money constantly -- like finance and insurance -- are able to easily take a small fraction of each transaction and get paid huge amounts without causing friction.
Meanwhile, many worthwhile industries that generate a lot of value have relatively high and unpleasant friction to getting paid.
A lot of criticisms and bad feelings about money refer to people who have excellent skills and setup in #2 -- good bargaining power, perhaps monopoly power, and the ability to take a cut off transactions without anyone really able to push back or opt out.
As industries mature, profits often fall off as new competition come into the market and drive prices down. Has the value that the earlier incumbent provided dropped? No, often it's actually increased as they've improved their product or service. But meanwhile, their ability to capture that value and bargaining power has gone down, so they profit less.
Thus, some companies and people look to focus on keeping that bargaining power and value capture up, those #2 criteria, instead of just building more value. And it seems likely that that's a fundamental nature of business and will remain that way. Competition coming in usually drives prices and profits down; simply just innovating and improving value without locking down a competitive position means less profit.
Meanwhile, aggressive value capturing type activities often generate a lot of bad will and backlash, which then hits pure innovators, inventors, entrepreneurs, producers.
Which is unfortunate, but perhaps just a fundamental nature of business and society.
No swooping takeaway or action item here -- just something worth thinking about, as the dynamics of getting money play out.