Art and culture may be "unproductive" from a utilitarian point of view, but it's valuable and enriching in ways hard to measure on a spreadsheet.
Society never needed to hand out money to every self-proclaimed artist for art to thrive.
But the idea that art / artists don't require money isn't my read of history.
When you go to an art museum in, say, London, you'll find lots of fantastic paintings depicting religious themes. Were artists of the time fixated only on the religious aspects of life? No doubt religion was more important, but the real consideration was that patronage came once from the Church.
Patronage chooses the best artists available to produce art for the patron. This measures grant money to self-proclaimed artists and are not based on merit.
With the democratization of art that followed the subsidizing with public money of artists an all new class of people was born. One that didn't really have that same "skin in the game" but had at their disposal money that wasn't theirs to distribute as they saw fit.
I believe that gave rise to situations like you mention. Yes, there are a lot of excellent movies that were destroying by early critics (not saying that didn't happen before, I'm very well aware of great music compositions being ruined because some monarch didn't like the opening concert). The thing is, why do we let (and keep letting) those critics to be some kind of gate keepers of art?
Here is some interesting read about the history of art critics: https://www.artrewards.net/editorial/the-evolution-of-art-cr...