And yet none of those items are out of reach of the average person. On the contrary, they’re usually pretty cheap. Precisely because replication costs nothing, the strategy that maximizes profit is to maximize the number of copies sold rather than the amount earned per copy.

You can see similar effects in hardware too, since even without self-replication there are already massive economies of scale. How much does it cost to get access to the output of most advanced chip fabrication technology on the planet? The answer is whatever the price of the latest flagship smartphone is.