By some definition of "worked". If we define "worked" as "made money for", who it worked mostly for are the middlemen and a minority of writers... a minority that with the advent of LLMs is likely to shrink even further.

It was probably intended that way, but the reality is that the power has been with the publisher since the beginning, and they've absolutly been screwing over the author's as well. Only the most successful author's have gotten decent deals.

I don't have an answer to this either though, i just wanted to point out that copyright has arguably never been successful at getting money to the content creators proportional to the value the Publisher extracted from the work either.

Journals get their content for free. Actually often they charge the authors for it.

Research is mainly funded by governments and taxes.

Put differently, we consider -- but don't think a whole lot about -- about Wikipedia's "funding," because that's NOT the most important part/innovation of that model.

We should better answer what is?

Can you give some examples of new knowledge that was copyrighted? Generally copyright is used to protect art, software and textbooks. People who produce new knowledge generally are not paid by copyright. The knowledge is either kept secret or published in a journal from which the author recieves no compensation.