Power Laws in Culture

This kind of for-show pretend logic is aggravating. News is filled with it and people are suckers for it:

predicted that the Internet would fragment attention and consumption would shift into the “tail.” But Top Gun Maverick generated over $700 million at the domestic box office last year

Why is there a "but" in there? Those statements don't obviously contradict each other. You have to do some mental arithmetic to work out what proportion of the population that is, and know the price of a movie ticket and size of the population. How about just say "20% of Americans watched Top Gun Maverick"? Or better, compare it to the fragmentedness of historical movies. Maybe there's still a downward trend in popularity of hits. We're supposed to feel like we learnt something without actually having a clue.

The thing about power laws is that they assert an underlying mechanism that causes the power law, but they look very close to an exponential or other long-tailed distribution, and it's not so easy to distinguish between them empirically.

I recall reading a paper (but I can't find it right now) that re-evaluated a bunch of datasets that were claimed to exhibit power laws, and found that they actually were more closely aligned to an exponential distribution or other.