I’ve been wondering the same about a lot of right wing economic policy. Why push for policy that is a net negative for everyone in the long run? I have since realized that it does make sense if you don’t look at it in terms of wealth, but rather in terms of power. The control you have over other people doesn’t depend on your absolute wealth, but rather the relative wealth you have compared to others, and so for someone looking for that kind of power (i.e. most billionaires as far as I can tell) it wouldn’t matter if something they do hurts everybody, as long as it hurts you more than it hurts them.

It gets better, but learning vocabulary at that level is going to feel very slow no matter what. I would recommend keeping a fairly low bar for just ignoring words and moving on, as keeping up the reading habit is by far the most useful. If reading feels tedious it’s easy to lose interest.

One to two new words per page sounds high enough where you are bound to get repetition, so you may want to only look up words that seem either important for context or familiar (i.e. feels like something you’ve seen before) to get the most value. I combine that with spaced repetition (Anki) for words that I seem to look up often, but Anki has a bit of a learning curve so it may or may not suite you.