I don't necessarily disagree with you from a long time college sports fan point of view, but you guys are framing this argument as all or nothing, like it's either the way it was with media companies, universities, college administrators, and coaches raking in millions while the kids got their scholarships and had limited mobility, or the wild west scenario that we see today.
College sports has been very big business with the players being the attraction for 30+ years now, and the NCAA and schools knew what was going on and enriched themselves while maintaining the "student-athlete" facade. If they had been less greedy and a bit more forward thinking, a system of sharing the wealth might have been established that headed off the tsunami we are seeing now.
Doing so might have prevented the awful "one and done" trend because there would have been incentive for kids to stay in college and grow as people and players before entering the draft, many whose careers were stunted due to not being ready for the jump but for whom the lure of that payday superseded any other factors. A sane revenue sharing plan and some transfer portal guardrails would have maintained the health of college sports and possibly avoided the free for all we are witnessing.
As far as conference "realignment" and the crazy travel schedules even for non-revenue sports and teams needing to re-recruit their own players 24-7-365, we are on the same page. The greed and corruption of the NCAA and schools is what is at fault for this current state of affairs, and unfortunately it is highly unlikely to go back to anything resembling what we had.