That’s pretty much every arts industry though. The theater and film industries also have a bad habit of chewing up new workers, under the guise of “working on a passion project”. And it doesn’t matter how many people they chew through; There will always be a new graduating class full of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed graduates to abuse.
Hell, look at the video game industry. The entire industry is designed around underpaying creatives, forcing them to work unreasonable 60-80 hour weeks because of unreasonable launch dates set by marketing departments, and then abandoning the workers as soon as the game is complete. All because the creatives are passionate about what they’re creating, and capitalism has learned that it can abuse that passion. Hell, early Japanese video games even refused to put the employees in the game credits, because the publishing companies didn’t think the people who designed the games were important enough to mention.
Creative workers will tolerate a lot just so they can say they worked on a project.
I suppose that depends on how you define it, because they’re definitely tangentially related. I started my career in theater, running lights and audio for live events. Now I sell audio equipment, which I got familiar with by working in theater. I still occasionally run shows too, (when I have the time), because it’s what I enjoy doing. But the sales side of things is where the money is, so that’s where I landed in the course of my career. The vast majority of my clients are theaters, and if someone asked I’d confidently say that I work in theater.