Blame the TV deals I guess, the salaries have exploded to insane levels. Players can lose out on money for not making All NBA or All Star or whatever, but there's no punishment for losing the All Star game or not putting up a particular amount of stats.
For reference for the In Season Tournament the reward is
Every player on the roster for the champion of the in-season tournament will receive a $500K bonus. Reach the champion game and lose? That's a $200K bonus. Players get $100K for reaching for the semifinals, and $50K for reaching the quarterfinals
So naturally for an All Star player (ie probably a max contract), that money is nothing to you. But for your bench guys, that's not that small a sum if you win it all. Theoretically your All Stars aren't playing to win that money for themselves, but so their teammates can get it.
By contrast for All Star Game if your team wins each player gets 100k (50k prior to 2018), losing team gets 25k (so I was wrong on that earlier, at least if I am to believe the article I found), plus winning team gets 240k for whatever charity they're playing for. Apparently State Farm also donated $1900 for every assist to some other charity/social impact type thing.
Idk what the answer is for this, but to me, if you (general you, not necessarily Knox) really hate the NBA product that much, just stop watching it. Go do something else with your time. Support the WNBA, go watch some other sport, watch college basketball instead. Nothing sends a message better than affecting their profits, so if everyone who complains about how this is the worst era of basketball and the league sucks and all that just stopped supporting the NBA entirely, something would change.