I'm not saying this to join the debate or anything but I think it's kind of a situation of the internet meaning writers can now actually get paid what they deserve. For reference, your ballpark figure is actually not that far off what you'd probably pay a writer for a real-life story if you submitted something to a literary journal, for example. A short story would probably get you $50-ish if they liked it, maybe $500 if there were some prizes, maybe $1000 for a really nice prize. A lot of the time they won't even pay you at all. Then factor in the fact that most journals aren't going to accept submissions a lot of the time, publishing houses are slow and have their own issues with what they want to publish, and then you realise writing covers fuck all irl. You were actually not far off my own experience irl, to be honest.
But one of the good things about the internet is that your exposure can come so much more quickly and you can start getting paid enough to actually eat, a trend which I've heard is getting quite popular nowadays.
Eh, it depends a lot on the field, I'd say... For someone looking to publish a book, for instance, the hard part was always getting published - but once you were (and your book was received decently by the public), you'd see a fair price for your work. Perhaps not enough to be a household's sole income, unless you were either particularly talented or a hack who could write at a ferocious pace, but more than a token sum.
With the internet stripping away so many barriers to entry, however, a lot of people are practically giving away their work for free just in hopes of being noticed, something that is depressing value across the board. And when both the producer and the consumer are trained to think that two dollars is a fair price for an entire book, it's much harder for an author to ask for a price that is actually commensurate with the value of their work; it's hard to imagine anyone but the most famous actually being able to make a
career of being an author at the prices I see self-published authors asking these days. While getting published may have become easier, making a living from what you write may, ironically, have become harder.
It's unmistakably a boon for something like the author of an H-game, however, whom I imagine had a hard time meeting with interested parties before the internet made it possible.