Yes, passive income businesses didn't fail because operators stopped caring. They failed because the markets were structurally broken.
Dropshipping, affiliate SEO, print-on-demand... these face the same margin compression regardless of how engaged you are. Ad cost inflation, platform saturation, algorithmic displacement, etc... it doesn't matter whether the operator is engaged or not.
Caring's a moat only where differentiation is possible. In commoditized markets, it doesn't move the needle.
While we're on the topic of nuclear pollution, "nuclear semiotics" is an interdisciplinary field of research focused on creating a "warning message intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years."
While 10K is a few orders of magnitude greater than 500, I imagine the problems may be similar... if not more extreme.