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The financial industry isn’t immune to “who cares”-ism, or folks who are bad at their jobs. Heck, the index fund is the ultimate “who cares?” product - you’re explicitly saying that you don’t care about underlying fundamental valuations and are going to piggyback off the price discovery mechanism of other active investors, and you accept average returns as a result.

In practice, financial results are driven by transactions, and so any mediocrity that doesn’t lead to the customer going elsewhere isn’t going to show up in the financial results. You need an actual competitor to risk losing money to sucking. But I’ll note that in cases where there is an actual competitor to sclerotic old industries, one that actually does care, the investors in the competitor tend to become fabulously wealthy and the investors in the old industry go broke.