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It has nothing to do with price and everything to do with transformation. You can't use someone else's copyrighted material unless you're using it for commentary or satire. Most fanworks aren't doing that. A 50k Naruto x Sasuke smut fic is not commentary or satire in 99% of cases.
But most fan works, as a matter of practice, are not really hurting the original product. Fangames, maybe, but AO3 is, if anything, probably keeping people's interest in the fandoms that they write about.
But also harming the perception of the IP by associating it with pornography.
No, not really. If you go to AO3, you basically know what you're getting into in the first place. To the extent people get disgusted by it, it's an in-joke within the community (you'll have poetic titles with tags for anal fisting or A/B/O mechanics).
The mainstream fanfiction sites are fanfiction.net, Wattpad, Tumblr, etc. Younger fans are probably going there, and insofar as there is porn and sex, it's basically findable everywhere.
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