I think you see the "curating and distributing" thing good with scientific journals. They charge money while the authors and editors work for free. Why does anyone participate in this predatory model? Back in the days people got their new scientific articles by subscribing to a real paper journal and the journal did real work for science communication.
Today everyone can upload a PDF and a good community could curate what's crap and what's insightful. Scientific journals are only not dying out of tradition. If it's published in a high-ranked journal it must be good, so we must publish in the journal ... while the publisher doesn't do much work anymore. Printing is automated, hosting is near free compared to the prices they charge for articles, but the science community still believes in their reputation.
The overall problem you see at many places is filtering. When people talk about all the "slop" on their art site, the problem is not someone posting low-quality works or needing storage for it, but that their feed isn't filtered to include only high-quality works (or works they like for other reasons). The same applies for books, scientific articles, and many other works.
Having one authority, like with scientific journals, is one option for filtering. Having publishing being costly (like with paper books) is another one. Both are only proxies for quality and not always good proxies. Maybe AI curating your feed could be a long-term solution? I am not sure if the systems are there yet and not sure how much work it is to clearly formulate your criteria (on the other hand, just as you believe in publishers you could believe in criteria-presets curated by others), but at least these things can process large volumes of works to find the gems, given a good enough definition of what you consider a gem.