Yes, it is a ton of work to step through and understand minified and obfuscated code, but it is a skill that many people learn and do if there is motivation. On your second point, I think the key is that the people who do have a reason to detangle the logic of minified JS can be very impactful. I consider open viewing of Javascript as similar to noncompetes in California. It allows one to view competitors source code (if you have the motivation to work for it), which ultimately allows you to learn from and adapt their best practices. Yes, this can have negative effects, but it also may allow for a smaller company to leapfrog a larger incumbent who is too lazy to do some part of their processing server side. I could probably learn a lot about how to write (and block!) analytics tracking by reviewing the Google analytics javascript source code for example.

(Disclaimer: I've never looked at Google's analytics .js files and that may not be possible for some technical reason unknown to me)