This would be true if cultures didn't change, but they do. Switch your argument to something else, say splashing water on fires using tools. By your logic the technology can't ever be disentangled with the purpose of extortion, a bad purpose. Yet time passed and now firefighting isn't an extortion in which your house burns down unless you pay the firefighters. In that case, splashing water on fires really is just splashing water on fires. It also isn't like the business model was without perverse incentive - start a fire and you potentially get paid for putting it out.

This isn't me saying you're wrong that people are making a mistake in ignoring externalities, but more that the reason why it is a mistake isn't that they correctly articulated one component in the problem they were thinking about - its because they ignored the other stuff which interacts with it.