Keep in mind "copyright" explicitly does not cover "knowledge" or "ideas".

The reason I buy books is rarely for knowledge or ideas, its either for a good story in the case of fiction (which the author definitely should have the right to exclusively commercialise), or for the authors explanation of and idea or some knowledge which goes beyond the raw information I could find in the scientific papers or higher level descriptions.

Good storytelling and teaching are valuable and should come with some sort of exclusive rights to control and profit from by the author. And even bad storytelling and teaching should have that same protection from other people distributing it in ways that restrict the authors rights.

Clearly 130 years of protection is insane, and all it does is keeps Micky Mouses lawyers able to buy new yachts. But as others in this discussion have pointed out, after 20 year almost all of the authors who are still earning money off their works are already rich beyond most authors realistic hopes. I'm not sure 20 years is "the right length" for protection, you sometimes hear stories of works being rediscovered and becoming wildly popular more that 20 years past the original publication date (Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill getting back into the charts on the back of it being used in Stranger Things - for example).

Things have changed a lot since the late twentieth century. The kind of people you imagine, who can live full-time off writing, are responsible for a vanishingly small amount of the books that appear today. Piracy has little to do with it; this is primarily due to the fierce competition from other books, the glut of content available today, but especially from mobile phones as fewer and fewer people read books. Even for those who make appreciable income off books, the books are nevertheless usually a side gig alongside other hustles.

We certainly wouldn't want to return to the pre-1976 era, where, as we all know, no books were written.

Obviously yes. While I have the privilege of earning money from services instead of products, I still think that producing creative works is important and should be done whether the motive is profit or not. Many things are not profitable. Should we leave them unwritten? Leave them to those who have the time to spend. For those who have chosen the life of producing products that are easily copied, it is part of _reality_ that those things will be copied when copying benefits the copier. That doesn't mean I think all books should be free. So many books I buy because I don't have another choice or because I want to support the author. But expecting everyone to be in the same situation as me is nonsense.

So you provide your services for free I presume.

> Imagine you're a professional writer and it's your main source of income.

There are probably a few thousand of these in the entire United States. The market system heavily under-values writing as is, independent of piracy

Imagine that terrible time before Copyright existed, and there was no motivation for anyone to make art, literature, or music.

"What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing." --Arthur Schopenhauer

You forgot to stipulate, “…living in an ultracapitalist country with no meaningful social safety net,” i.e. the USA.