Awesome take here, Luke. Really enjoyed reading this!
Money allowed humans to make the leap from tribal living by allowing us to quantify and reward value contribution in a scalable and mathematical way. From that standpoint, money was always intended to be a technology to quantify societal value contribution. But, as you pointed out, it's been manipulated and stolen for so many years that it is now very loosely correlated to real societal value. Money is so concentrated at the top that it's no longer society that determines value monetarily, it's those with the money who get to determine "what has value?". And 'value', in the eyes of a billionaire, is typically more money and more power, which has lead us to an economy that disproportionately rewards the people who are able to make rich people richer and more powerful, continuing in a perpetual cycle of greed and corruption.
IMO, the only way out of this cycle is to find ways to quantify and reward real value contribution again, as determined by the wisdom of the crowd. I believe this can happen, starting on a small scale with communities and companies, and eventually grow bigger from there until we have a system that rewards real contribution everywhere. That's what gets me so excited about DAO's and DAC's - we get to rewrite the rules and functionality of money in such a way that we can align the interests of the individual with the group.