I find this to be pretty disgusting but am hardly surprised. Think a lot of suits in this industry simply see this as a fun job that people will happily do for free. To some extent this is true but if you are creating work that is being turned into profit you have to be paid for it.
If this grows I hope the industry will just see a lot more people setting up there own companies and stronger independent projects while the lesser talents will go and work in the big studios. I myself have not heard or worked in any of the big film studios, but have heard enough to stop me wanting to work at any of the top video game ones. I personally would not want to work in a job where the main phrase said at the end of each project is "it got done".
It is getting a lot easier to create stuff these days though and I believe if they push this idea they will simply end up with much more competition from smaller teams who can massively undercut them due to much lower expenses. In my experience paying less never works, always costing you more in the long run. A professional will always do a great job and often exceed your expectations and requirements to deliver you a great product. If you hire a beginner you tend to end up doing more of the work yourself, fixing problems etc, because of this the cost will often equal what you would of paid to hire a professional as you try to repair what was a broken plan from the off and may well go unfinished.
This said it all depends on the project, if you are creating professional work that is making good profit you need to find and hire professional people to work on it. If you are creating lesser work with little to no profit you hire people who are starting out, improving reels or trying to gain experience.
I worked on a indy film some time back which is still in development now, the main animator was one of the best I have seen and worked with, able to produce outstanding work in very fast timeframes. He's rate was insanely cheap due to his starting out and building a folio of work to enable him to move onto bigger projects. The team he works with recently won the oscar for best animated short.
No one is going to give you a professional job from the off and this is why junior positions exist, I have not worked in a professional position in a high end studio and so would have to move into a junior role should I wish to work in the industry for a big company. Should the small team I am working with succeed and make a video game this would likely still be the case. I am very understanding of this, but I cannot understand how you can have someone pay you to do a juniors job. To me it is fundamentally wrong and if it grows it will only hurt the large companies in the long run.