If Priya had preferred to stay with her family, and there was no financial pressure, the situation would be unambiguously better. Her family may have encouraged her to go to study for family pride -- what if studying and living while studying were free for her and her family had no financial pressure for her to get a job and send money home? I struggle to see who benefits here. Maybe she would have preferred to stay home with her family, maybe she has siblings that she will miss, why would it be up to me at all? I don't get to define productive.
UBI (or whatever mechanism for providing basic needs) also doesn't mean there is no financial reward for employment. She could still go and study and earn money and send it home to a family that doesn't need it badly except now if the job is automated by GPT4 somehow no one suffers. No harm is done other than that she wasted her time studying this thing, but no one is going to suffer because of bad luck beyond wasted time.
There are a number of things that I do think people don't find meaning in doing. Many of these things can be increasingly automated like being a teller or working in a call center, but not all of which can be (for now), like repairing sidewalks. These are a set of things that aren't very fun to do which still need to be done, sure. Oddly the ones I can list off my fingers are not the ones that pay well, so something is certainly not working right on the incentives, sure. I agree that society should reward jobs less if they are meaningful and enjoyable than jobs that no one wants to do, but that's not really how capitalism works.
Plenty of people don't tend to do things even they would consider "productive" in their spare time, but how much of that is because they are under constant financial stress and have so little free time? I believe that if basic needs are met people will generally find more genuine sources of meaning, for them, whether or not I consider those things productive.
But my opinion isn't important here, that's the patronizing part.
I simply do not believe people will sit around and watch TV all day if they are in good health and aren't required to work all the time for security. Or if they do then that's their business, I'd rather try to inspire them to do other things than force them to by withholding food and shelter.
Let people be people and learn what makes their human life meaningful to them rather than trying to starve them into action that you consider productive.
