You're accurately describing the status quo, but I think the parent's point is that a lot more people, me included, would be interested in defending these frequency allocations as a public good if they were more practically usable, and practically usable directly implies encryption. It's an awful lot of primo bandwidth for a bit of hobbyist DXing.

I think the problem comes down to the HAM rules having been formulated pre-Internet, where the distinction between amateur and commercial activity was a lot more obvious: noncommercial ~= useless, commercial ~= useful. The advent of the Internet demonstrated the existence of a whole new category: noncommercial ~= useful.

Today we've got all kinds of noncommercial but highly useful RF applications, e.g. Meshtastic, that are stuck in the relatively limited ISM bands (yes, I'm aware of HAM mode, but recall usefulness → encryption). Just using the Internet isn't a replacement for these projects, as they're intended to be useful offgrid or during times of centralized Internet disruption. IMO it's a crying shame that stuff like this, the bleeding edge of non-commercial usefulness in RF, is lower priority than ragchewing. Besides, it's not as if all the technical aspects go away under looser rules: propagation behavior etc etc are just as important, if not moreso, than they ever were.

This doesn't mean just hand it over to the corps; there's a third way. Some chunks of current HAM spectrum should be converted to ISM. That doesn't mean a total free-for-all; duty cycle and EIRP limits apply and can be scaled appropriately to the frequency's propagation characteristics. The degree of freedom in usage in ISM bands drives innovation in protocol design to make better use of available bandwidth, as has happened with 802.11, so congestion/commercial use is actually a good thing.