The thing about the large neural network shitmachines is that they don't operate in some abstract space; they run on actual bricks-mortar-and-environmental-footprint server farms which cost somebody money to build and operate, catering in a general way to the kind of massively parallel processing load that LLMs represent.
When considering why a blatantly useless misfeatured environmentally and socially destructive tech with few to no legitimate use cases persists, consider the fact that the likes of Google built and paid for those datacentres. You think they think they have to bend to demand, or lack of it? When they can brute-force top-down force society to display a demand so that they can turn a profit off something they invested in?
(Consider the throughline from the faddish blockchains with their massively parallel server farm loads, to the faddish NFTs which were the selfsame blockchains in a Groucho mustache disguise, to faddish "AI" with its massively parallel server farm loads—)