It's more about the fact that why does the streaming service get to earn money in perpetuity for someone else's work and the creators of that work don't get to as well?

If you are jealous of that model, you should probably be fighting for it for yourself as well, not blocking the way for the ones who are trying to fight for themselves.

"I'd kill to get a cut of the pie that every AI server I bring back up generates, on top of my raises."

The equivalent situation is more like if you had salary + residuals, and the residuals were a significant enough part of your compensation package that your salary was a relatively small impact factor. You take the residuals into account when budgeting household finances.

Then over the course of years, you get less and less income from residuals, which shrink way faster than regular salary bumps can account for - everywhere has new servers you've been working on that technically lie outside your existing contract. The new servers are hugely profitable for the companies you work for, but your real world compensation shrinks, despite the new servers requiring just as much work on your part. It's less about the residuals, more about the fact that you took a lower base salary on the understanding that you'd be getting a certain level of residual payments, and that's undermined by the continually shrinking pay on technicalities.

But on top of all this, imagine that the total compensation levels were never great, even before residuals shrink. Most people doing work like yours barely make ends meet, and it becomes harder and harder to afford basic living costs.

Basically, there's two points of contention when it comes to overall pay levels: the base level pay increase, which is a regular, time based bump; and the significant losses in net pay because streaming has led to increasingly unfavourable outcomes for actors and writers. Both of these problems could be solved without residuals, but it would require a base pay way higher than it is now. This would make the upfront costs of movies and TV shows insanely more expensive, and finding funding for projects would get much harder.

I'm not a film historian so I can't really give you a rundown on the how and why actors get paid the way they do now and how shitty it was for so long before. I can give you the shity answer of its art, it's speculative and the studios will make money off their work for decades once filming ends. AND, unionize.

The tech industry is a cesspit of exploitation and it's not gonna get better unless y'all unionize and fight for it. I can't fathom how residuals would work in the tech industry outside of those adjacent to the arts for things like CGI and stuff.