It honestly doesn't seem outrageous to me. Just because this is the direction society has decided to go in doesn't make the alternative absurd. If you'll recall in the early age of the internet hand-curated link boards were actually extremely popular i.e. "I'm Billy and here's a bunch of really interesting information about sewage treatment" and then just a spam of links.

I think there's a very reasonable argument to be made that Google should simply link to the information and not extract and re-present the information that would be much fairer in enabling websites to support themselves. If the content you're creating is stolen and reposted elsewhere you're losing that portion of revenue and Google's news strategy has driven click throughs to the actual articles way down which reduces ad revenue and discourages subscription.

As a general rule, not being willing to entertain a state other than the way things currently are, is a bad habit to get into.

Did you miss the part where I said people are conflating indexing a story on a search engine with "borrowing" other people's content for your own news site?

The first can be fixed with a simple robots.txt file.

How do you tell Google they may index your story, but may not "borrow" your headline or photos for their own news site?

There's a ton of international case law saying that a mere link is not illegal.