One could imagine that the guild called up something it then couldn't put down, but necessarily because people will or prefer it so, but somehow because the world, at least in the story, fundamentally could work this way.
The Wikipedia article discusses how confusing it is to understand the exact position of the story with respect to narrative truth, when the entire story is playing with the idea of what is real and what makes it real, as well as explicitly talking about the idea of fiction coming to life:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...
The most widely known example is Lysenkoism. No supporter of that theory ever said they were fabricating data to please the apparatus. An example closer to the one in the story was academic support of Nazi "anthropology."
To me, this suggests rather clearly something similar to the OP’s interpretation. His drawing on of this story as allegory for our future occurs to me also as apt, and what I imagine as what Borges would have envisioned.
I also don’t quite follow your assertion that “social perception obviously wholly creates the real and only reality”, as social perception clearly varies by each persons’ distinct society - and anyhow even if considered on the level of the entire society, such a vast, sprawling perception could hardly be considered a singular “only” reality.
So what I take TUOT as being is an exploration of the Idealism idea, where Borges puts a twist on it: the (dialectical) beliefs of the communalistic idealists of Tlön turn out to be true, on a certain level, because sufficiently compelling ideas and totalizing ideologies make their claims true. In that way, 'perception' becomes 'reality'. Only that which the ideology or state can perceive is real, and everyone is required to see like a state. (As much as he loved Idealism & Platonism, Borges always seemed to accept them only on a literary level, as applying to fiction and literature - there is indeed 'Man' in fiction, but there is not an actual Man in a Platonic region of forms, there is only a term 'man' we nominalistically apply to entities as convenient.)
That is, idealism is correct, in a sense, and the artifacts of Tlön become real because the savants of the conspiracy 'perceive' them (in their minds) and create them. And as Tlön takes over the world and gains power, it gains more realness and more of its artifacts come into existence - or people just lie about them or pretend they exist and falsify documents to accord with the new party line, and doublethink their way to 'seeing' the new labyrinthine reality forged by their fellow humans.
One might say that _hrönir_, especially, are a savage Orwellian parody of how things go in totalitarian dictatorships: the description of the experiments with the prisoners could as easily be set in Stalinist Russia or Maoist China, where the real story is that on the fourth try, after turning up only the equivalent of fishing for a muddy boot, everyone has figured out that, to satisfy the decrees from above, they need to buy or forge some ancient artifacts of unconvincing antiquity (and so no counter-revolutionary skeptics can be permitted near) and that is how _hrönir_ are discovered. The same way Lysenko manufactured agricultural miracles or innumerable falsifications like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_from_Dazhai_in_agricultu... became official policy, doubted only on pain of death.
Those who disagree and wish to maintain their integrity, can only retreat into quietism or 'internal exile', and spend their time on topics with as little political relevance as possible and avoid even publishing (except as samizdat), and let "a scattered dynasty of recluses take over", as it is too late to stop the Tlön revolution, and "the [whole] world [will] be Tlön".
Whether it is possible to circumvent this remains to be seen. Science has demonstrated it can to some degree, but it only covers a portion of reality.
An suitably brain rotted riposte to your complaints would be something like
‘Wordcels be sneething at rotationmaxxing shapechads’
and an image of a badly drawn wojak figure.
You can say wrong. But for the record, you lost the credibility to use the word "disrespectful" when you termed all philosophers as "wordcels." :)
In coolly-detached economics terms, we could call it a large-scale business in assymetric information.[1]
But the abuse of assymetric information can lead to market collapse. And to judge from the state of modern society, the information collapse has returned people into Plato's allegorical cave of ignorance and fear. [2]
The intellectual catastrophe is the same, but the difference in the modern world is a) the enormity of what we have lost, and b) that people's caves are more comfortable and they watch the shadows dance on a wall of high-resolution pixels.
[1] _ https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asymmetricinformation.a...
To add to the recommended readings, I shall also mention "On Exactitude in Science"; I use this as an example of project plans where PMS try to be too detailed, and hence become useless.