Financial journalism has a genre problem with AI. The year-end funding recap is a reliable traffic format: gather the numbers, rank the recipients, chart the trends. Every major publication ran one after 2025's record year [8][10], and collectively they produced something that looks like accountability journalism and functions as amplification. The question the format structurally cannot ask — whether the capital is funding durable businesses or subsidizing adoption until unit economics are forced onto companies that have never had to think about them — went unasked in every version of…