This is dangerously dismissive. Cultural value is subjective, and in any case these articles provide an in-road to other articles, giving the opportunity to expand people’s knowledge further.
I would, however, support Wikipedia having ads on articles in such pop culture categories – and those alone, of course, to avoid conflict of interest where factual accuracy is more vital. This would have to be carefully managed by the Wikimedia Foundation — marking articles for monetisation should be handled only by a specific role – but if done quite carefully and in a privacy- and user-respecting manner (eg Carbon ads [0]) could potentially subside the academic content without damaging Wikipedia’s brand.