Normally, I'd agree, but being an author/squatting on your own IP is arguably a barely evil way to earn a billion dollars. I don't even think she tried. She could've made 5mil if like half a million people bought her book, and is like 100 times that easy.
The only surplus value she exploited was like maybe publishers, editors, and movie royalties. Plenty of people do that and then go on to lead pretty cool lives, or at least don't become so fucking vile. You don't need to be evil to write a children's book, usually the opposite.
Like you'd think someone with that kind of imagination could think of all kinds of ways to do awesome shit with their money. Why even fucking touch Twitter?
In defense of people who believed this, they were thousands of years away from anything being better on earth.
Like imagine living through the decline of a brutal slave empire, which took centuries to fully collapse, and the thing that replaced it was fucking internecine Feudal warfare for another millennia.
Unironically, whether you can stomach all the atrocities that happened afterwards or not, until the rise of Islam and its golden age, you would be pretty justified in thinking the world was never going to be better than it was in an age when most people were still utterly miserable.