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I'm taking a history of modern (well, post-1600) theater class right now, so come back in a week or two and I'll have something more specific to say about this! My initial impression of what we've talked about so far in class is that telling controversial stories was in fact a central component of at least one modern theater movement, but overall, the history of Broadway seems to be more rooted in American melodrama more than anything else, of which your opinion is a fairly typical representation. So that's a fair take. But more broadly, "making money" and "entertainment first" are not general theatrical principles, and they tend to be more American-specific than universal. What form and content these kind of performing arts have taken and included is usually more closely linked with what society is going through.
For example, there's this fascinating history in England of a few successive movements and genres that reflect the anxieties, restrictions, and feelings of the era. You had Puritans take over for a while who absolutely and passionately loathed theater, and then when the monarchy was kinda-sorta restored and theater was legal again, you had a few interesting things happen. One, you had people who were tired of the super-strict puritan stuff as well as civil war, they wanted happy endings. So several Shakespeare plays were rewritten to have happy endings (Lear survives, Romeo and Juliet are together, etc). They also let women start to act, and "restoration comedy" ended up getting quite raunchy. Then, Enlightenment ideas start to become all the rage. You had this result in some "comedy of manners" and related genres, where plays started reflecting things like "marriage is a social construct/contract". Also, you get "sentimental comedy" as a sort of backlash against the excesses of restoration comedy, where they really weren't very funny but were often set up as a means of preaching moral lessons to people to make better choices. But wait! Enlightenment ideas started to lead to some crazy revolutions and unrest, paired with the beginnings of industrialization and urbanization. Cue Romanticism! Now we're back to emotion over intellect, instinct over reason, basically angst about Enlightenment ideas that seemingly made a mess of things. Shakespeare makes another comeback, plots grow more fantastical again, and this dovetails with advancements in the spectacle and technical side of the stage and increasing popularity.
It is only within that context of changing ideas of "why should I watch theater" and "who should watch theater" (which are extensive and beyond the brief overview here) that soon melodrama was born. In fact what would later become musicals first became popular because, bizarrely, in England for a long time only two (and a third in the summer) theater companies were licensed to do theater, and other play performances were illegal. Yet this only applied to spoken text, so if they threw in some songs here and there, it no longer counted as a banned play, but instead something, uh totally different. Yes your honor, totally different. As another side-note, technically an entire field called "dramaturgy" exists and is exactly what you describe where scripts, cast, sets, etc. are evaluated in context! These people are often attached to theater companies directly, though there are also some in academia, etc. How much they are employed or utilized, well this depends. However, they exist already within the theater community, so this idea that "oh that's the nonprofit realm, get away from my entertainment" is not very accurate.
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