Nail on head.
It's not even necessarily the money that's ruined it, I've come to realise. It's that there's now so much money to be made in the wider football industry that the actual football on the pitch is run as mere marketing. You want players to produce flashy moments so that they will be highly rated on FIFA so kids will play as your team and then subscribe to your social media. As you say, each player is their own brand and a team is simply a collection of those brands in an attempt to gather clout.
This is probs a big part of why the Jj idea bailed. We correctly saw the way football was going, but we wrongly figured that Jj could be established as a suprabrand that transcends that of the players- something which Barcelona, Madrid and Man Utd have, for example. I think all of us here argue that throwing out much of the pre-existing identity of the team was the worst way to start, and then signing Mr Brand for 100m instantly scuppered what was left of the idea, and last summer with the Pogba signing we submitted to the understanding that it's all about the players nowadays and we need to play the same game as the rest of the losers.
Nothing wrong with players securing the bag, but now it's left for us dinosaurs to remember the halcyon days when it was about the football - the 90 minutes of football not the clips edited together with enough effects to avoid a copyright strike. It was about the football and about the team. Long gone. Only upside is we're so boring to watch it's just us grumpy purists still hanging onto Juventus lol