Seems like you're missing the part where they have to pay someone (or more accurately, entire teams of people) a lot of money to actually come up with the set idea and instructions.
Boiling LEGO down to just "a bunch of formed plastic" is criminal.
Boiling LEGO down to just "a bunch of formed plastic" is criminal.
I explicitly said in it that LEGO is successful because of the combination of instructions and plastic.
I further argue that you could unlock value by unbundle the two. If you have salary data on LEGO designers please share. In the meantime I assume a good model designer would make more in the described platform model. (Comparable to a newspaper journalist going solo with Substack.)