You're saying SV (& co) should convene some kind of gentleman's agreement that they should all leave a massive, profitable, legal, intellectually interesting niche with a stable customer base, because its immoral - perhaps.
Can you think of a single other industry where this worked? It seems implausible to me that it would.
Okay, here we go: No, I am not saying anything you said.
This was not about a gentleman's agreement at all - that was a rhetorical figure to demonstrate that it is not the game which is at fault, it’s both. The behaviour of the game and the behaviour of the actors in that game, and almost in any other game is not an input -> output scenario, but instead, the output of the loop will be the input of the exact same loop. That is the definition of a feedback loop. It’s all recursion.
By shifting the responsibility to the ominous “game”, which is just another term for a system, you exclude the elements of a system from being part of the system itself.
There is a whole branch of science occupied with this. System Dynamics, Cybernetics, Chaos Theory, Systems Theory and whatnot. The argument that actors in a system are decoupled from the system or the environment as in a closed system approach is factually wrong. Apart from laboratories, there is practically no closed system on this planet.
The phrase “hate the game not the player” is cybernetic nonsense with the sole purpose of giving up responsibility. It does not matter that it gets repeated more often than not. It won’t be correct, no matter how many times the figure is used.
The game would not exist if there were a consensus among players to not play.
Technically, this is not linear as you argue, instead, this is a feedback loop. The game influences the actors, the actors influence the game.
To prevent an unwanted outcome, you must interrupt the loop at an arbitrary point of your choice.