In general, indie production - in every medium - is run on some combination of favors and gaslighting. You can get away with being more intensively exploitative in the moment, taking fewer precautions, and doing things in non-standard(less effective) ways precisely because you're the little guy and the real victim here.

If we're talking about supporting an industry with professional talent, pointing to the entry level capital cost isn't the way to do it, because there's an element of Baumol's cost disease, where the relative cost of your talent rises because everything else got cheaper. And you want to have the ability to pay people to go the extra mile without duping them. You can certainly make more varied kinds of productions on modern tech and budgets than before, but if there isn't an income stream that keeps the talent base there, you end up with privileged talent that can buy their way into an arts career, not veterans who built an artisanal skillset in the process of staying employed.

I suspect we're actually going in the direction of more and more adaptations. The Marvel movies and Star Wars shows are basically that; Dune, White Noise are both book adaptations. Anime succumbed to it a long while back and most of what's released each season is from a manga or light novel. It's a robust model because it can frame the production budget as an advertising cost, while also tapping into the success of the source, spreading out risks.

But adaptation, as good as it can be, pushes the medium to be in service to its source material, and to "give fans what they want". It's not building off the nature of the medium itself, so it's also somewhat unsatisfying if you really want the films and shows that push boundaries.

Cost of a camera is a tiny piece of good production. There's still good videographers, lights and people to aim them, sound equipment and people to hold them, actors, editors, and so much more. Saving even $100k on a camera is nothing.

I agree — if you allow that YouTube is the means of distribution for an indie-filmmaker. (For better or worse.)

I remember when, in the 80's, sci-fi conventions were perhaps one of the few means of recognition that the Super-8 indie guys get exposure (and maybe a career) with the likes of, for example, "Hardware Wars".