It's symbolic in the same way that value accrued by trading pet rocks or beanie babies is symbolic -- the fact that someone will pay money, at some particular point in time, for the asset is irrelevant. It is not generative of money returns on its own.

Dividends, like rents generated by real estate, accrue based on the financial performance of the underlying asset. Dividend payout is the only way valuation has any real basis in financial performance of the underlying business.

No dividend = something else is afoot. Most stocks right now are baseball cards.

They can pay out later, sure. But they needn't pay out anything, ever. They could make a zillion dollars next year and you'd get none, directly. That's the point. Whatever you could get by trading the share is based on somebody's belief in its value, for some definition of "value" (see e.g., Tesla.)

People trade stock as if the companies were yielding something to the stock owners. Many don't. Acting "as if" the company is making those payments -- imputing a price to the stock according to the underlying fundamentals, or some temporally discounted variant -- is a fantasy. It is a symbolic act. An exercise in recursion, anchored in nothing.

The story the market is telling is a very different kind of story, now.