This is literally the foundation story of numerous billion-dollar businesses. In fact OpenAI managed to beg their way into a trillion dollars after losing money offering no kind of product for many years. It sounds like it's just a business plan that you don't like very much.
Off the top of my head, I believe Twitter, Youtube, Discord, Reddit, Imgur each had no monetization at all for the first 3~5 years of their existence. Or more recently there was uv, that write-it-in-Rust Python package manager that had no avenue for monetization but received millions in investment funding a team working on it full-time until successfully getting bought out by OpenAI.
yes, their business plans was always to engage a lot of users losing VC money until you are a platform with enough moat to add monetization. It was the plan all along
It is the plan for plenty of startups: when it works you become a tech giant, otherwise you fail and no one knows you
OpenAI, for example, is not profitable as far as I know. I think the users they have now will be in for a rude awakening once they have to come up with a business model in order to pay back their investors. Startups that don't have a business model and get bought also regularly get shut down shortly later, leaving users stranded, look at Nest or Keybase for example off the top of my head.