And this was never a problem in the 80's, 90's, and so on.
Sure it was. That's why the payola system thrived. Boosters and players justified the payouts based on the premise that the universities were making money off their names. That's precisely the root of the issue. Hell, SMU was on probation for this in 1974. I'm sure the whole problem predates that.
Now, you can argue that the general public has only fairly recently piled on to the commentary, but the boosters, schools, NCAA, and players have decried the schools making money off them for a long time. And that is the root of the problem, as far as those entities are concerned. They don't care about the scholarship. It holds no/very little value to them. So from a pure economic exchange, you're going to tell a young man that he can't ply his trade in the free market and the only way he can continue working on this career choice is to become an indentured servant for X number of years (it's changed over time) and the payment will be int he form of something you don't care about.
So yeah, the XFL offers relief from one piece of that problem, in that it offers opportunity for the best and brightest of that age group to ply their trade in the open market. It does not address the problems of the universities/NCAA making money hand over fist on the backs of its unpaid/underpaid/mis-paid labor.
NO matter what you say about a college degree or a scholarship, it simply doesn't hold any value for some people. We can agree that these people are, to use the proper term, Total Dumbasses (TM), but I think most would agree that you shouldn't be able tio use the name, image, or likeness of a person for the purpose of making money without offering fair compensation. In any free markey contract negotiation for such, if you offered Bitcoin to a player, they might say yes, but they also might say hell no, I want USD. That sort of negotiation is withheld from these grown, legal age adults in the NCAA system.
So like I said, the XFL offers one way for a select few players to just avoid that situation altogether, while doing nothing to address that wrong.