The amount of money that goes into the industry is not static. The original linked article specifically cites cases in which members of the production committee (often toy companies like Good Smile[0]) decided to deliberately take less money because they didn't want their control diluted. They're only able to do this because they can fleece animators into working longer for less money rather than having to get more capital in the project.
As for animators having to find new work... good? The current situation is one in which animators pursue their passions, and then have their passions completely take over their life and crush their soul. If they quit en masse, that would be backpressure against productions that want animators to fall on their swords, and production committees that want shit done cheaply.
[0] Who, incidentally, funded Hiroyuki Nishimura's[1] buyout of 4chan in exchange for all those J-List ads the site had.
[1] Former operator of 2channel who got pushed out in an incredibly sketchy way by his website host.
Isn’t this a paternalistic point of view? Why do you know better than the animators who are accepting these jobs? Who are you to tell them that their career choice is wrong?
Unless you want to say that getting paid a minimum wage paternalistic?
I mean, in this scenario they wouldn't get a job, or it'd be an evergreen job that they shouldn't expect to get early in their careers. They wouldn't just laze around if they can't get paid as an animator (especially not in Japanese culture).
At best they'd try to be their own entrepreneur and make money that way, while gathering experience for these now-evergreen studios. At worst they give up or try another career. Paternalistic or not, almost every first world country has labor laws precisely so a job can't pay pennies to sustain its business. And governments do that because they don't want income hoarded by the managers and stifling the middle/low class economy.