I see this type of attitude/comment frequently whenever the minimum wage comes up, but I've never seen any kind of justification for it.
If these aren't "real jobs" that deserve "real pay" then why are there billion(trillion?) dollar corporations built entirely on top of employing millions of people at minimum wage?
There aren't any such corporations. There are under a million people earning the federal minimum wage in the US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T16OC2.
I ask as an outsider and have to wonder why this didn't occur to an American.
I think the study is kind of stupid, since the minimum wage category is a temporary category with extremely high variability, it's not a fixed target. So the base assumption that it stays put long enough to study doesn't hold water for me.
You're taking more a societal point of view. At this level, I think you're missing the point of minimum wage. It doesn't provide a family with a living wage; it's just a limit on the monetary abuse that an above board company can dish out, just like we have labor laws that limit other types of abuse (like excessive hours for example). Whether and how our society should be ensuring living wages is kind of another discussion, much more complex. As they currently stand, minimum wages are probably a net good.
Maybe not family but definitely the individual, FDR on minimum wage:
Ultimately, he hoped to mandate that all workers would be paid "living wages" as described in his 1933 speech on the National Industrial Recovery Act, "It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By 'business' I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white-collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living."
From: https://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/blog/posts/what-did-fdr-...