Agreed. You need to be your own marketing, finance, and legal team. It's so much to put on one person on top of managing, well, life.

And even if you DIY everything possible, there will still be middlemen out there who spend their lives thinking of ways to step in and take a cut of any meager profits you may have

Video artists and filmmakers had a taste from 1960s on because their work was ~easy to copy. But IP law is fairly robust. Now anyone can suck everyone's art thru a straw. Very diff. And, impossible to know about all the business practices of different industries. Psychologically, it's too much.