If the vast majority aren’t willing to use their wallets to back this or that… sacrificing something vastly rarer, for the average HN reader at least, is just nonsensical.
Most people aren't going to voluntarily send money to the FDA, Social Security, or Medicare, or the courts, or the military, out of the goodness of their hearts. Left to their own devices, they'll freeload. But we all agree these things are important (as evidenced by how we vote), so we pay for them with mandatory taxes.
So your idea that something is nonsensical "if the vast majority aren’t willing to use their wallets to back this or that" doesn't hold water at all. Most people won't use their wallets to back anything, if it's left up to them as individuals.
Seems like it would shut down entire swaths of "I don't wanna pay for your <x>" bitterness and resentment.
It's also way easier to game, which is the problem here: the asymmetry of information is almost total as the consumer will never know anything behind what the supplier is regulated into saying, and even when it is, then anything that will present itself as an alternative will be massively overpriced (that's why organic stuff is twice as expensive even though it has less than a 25% difference in actual yield in the fields).
And again, your belief has zero empirical evidence, products never improve on that basis.
Where it kinda make sense is for veggies/fruits that are not grown with lots of water/fertilized and are not of calibrated genetics but that just gives you better tasting products because they are not engineered for productivity and not too water stuffed and thus have a more intense taste. In practice, if you are going to cook the stuff anyway, it doesn't matter much, it really makes a difference on stuff with no/low transformation.
Everything else "organic" is basically bullshit. Very often, they will sell you worse products at a premium (like the trend of "complete" pasta, where you get to pay more for fibers you can't digest and have bad taste).
I don't think paying more leads to anything indeed. What matters is the actual product choice, but it takes time and you need to be informed a lot, so most people are not able or unwilling to make the effort.
Someone who has time/money can make the effort of going to the local butcher, the preselection is almost guaranteed to be better but that's something only the richest can do nowadays.