Yeah, but my point is that's a vast exaggeration. You can league start with the final build you want to play. That's what I do every league. Is it slower in terms of making money than a meta build? Maybe, but who cares? Most people are not going to be equipped to use that league starter effectively anyway, so giving them that advice like it's going to make a huge effect to their final result... it's like giving a new driver a Formula 1 car because, technically, it is the fastest thing possible. At least in this metaphor they won't kill themselves by driving into a wall, but they don't need that high-performance machine, and they won't use it as you'd optimally think they would anyway, so it's rather pointless. I realize I'm arguing uphill here, but I just don't think this stuff is necessary. The irony is that a person will learn far, far more by building their own thing and making that effective than they will trying to ape league starters and meta builds without understanding any of it. That approach is how you end up with people having played the game for years and saying they only just started to learn how the game actually works. Because when you outsource all your knowledge to someone else, surprise, you have no knowledge.
At the end of the day, I find most of this is social signalling more than it is about efficiency. They are told you're dumb if you don't use X, Y, Z league starter, so that's why they do it. Not because it's actually helpful to them, but because everyone else is doing it. Same reason normies buy Apple phones and sneer at people who get a better or same phone for 1/2, 1/3rd the cost.
A final note on profits and getting there first: you're ignoring the flip side. For the 200k randoms coming in afterward... sure, they don't get to gloat about selling red maps for bank, but what do they get? An absolutely glutted market that lets you buy near-BiS items for cheap. You can get items for a divine or two once the market is filled out that you can only realistically improve on with mirror-tier items. That's why I say getting a slight edge is kind of pointless to the average player. So what if your build needs a dozen divines worth of gear to do what the perfect league starter does with a few dozen chaos? By the time you get there you can just trade for the items that make you as effective. I get it, in theory, there is an edge there, but that edge cannot even be properly utilized by the people who get random advice from Youtube videos.