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Notes -
One way to steelman this is to consider that it's a natural process of art returning to its ancestral roots – in a more professional, more specialized world. What worth are visionary utopias conjured by writers (or dramas pointing at some possible utopian outcome)? We have experts, activists and politicians and special services, also payment processors and investors and the rest of the market for that; it's blatantly undemocratic to aid some weird Idea Guy in using his verbal skill to disseminate his non-vetoed ideas, no doubt introducing harmful biases and potentially exposing us to existential risks. Words are power; power ought not to be wielded irresponsibly.
What use are stories, then? Palatable consumable vessels to reinforce ideology which was developed by people trained in ideological domains; warning of evil, reminding us of the attraction of good. Stories are stylized allegories, parables, and myths of the tribe, but the tribe's ethos does not originate in the stories. Imagine if we allowed speechwriters to engineer state or corporate policy, spin doctors to decide the ultimate direction of the spin – preposterous. It's only proper show of humility for an author to simply wrap the approved, taught doctrine from the pulpit in prettier words or images. Perhaps women are naturally better at this than men by such an extent (whereas men are better at autistic daydreaming; though men used to make okay moralist writers). But even if not, this job's not so hard that we'd lose a lot of value by using the award ceremony itself to make the same point as award-winning works.
To group trivial identitarian narcissism together with exploration of group-specific abstract aesthetics under the label of pandering is to make pandering uselessly broad a concept – unless we indulge in some mental gymnastics to define a group that is being pandered to in the latter case. Maybe your group is people who think they don't need social sanction to peddle their homegrown visions for society. Here's a dangerous one.
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