Except that we end up spending a vast amount of human effort doing work that fundamentally doesn't need to be done. There's no actual economic output to paying people to break rocks.
Now if it's pure, unfun grind that only pushes numbers around in an MMO then I'd agree it's basically just outsourced cheating. And a net negative both because it compromises a social form of entertainment and doesn't produce anything else of tangible value.
Who decides what work, "needs to be done"? I suppose you could argue that activities that create the necessities needed to survive (food, shelter, clothing), "need to be done", but everything else is simply a matter of choice. Economic output is a subjective, contrived metric.
With automation coming for most jobs, we can either live in a low to no work Utopia or a hypercapitalist hell. Given recent trends, my money is on hypercapitalist hell.
I'm not sure id consider those basic, either. A toddler couldn't do any of them