It never was. Why? Because the university in which the athletes are playing for don't pay them. NIL simply allows outside sponsors - which includes boosters - to pay a specific student-athlete a certain amount of money annually.
There's some talk saying NCAA DI sports was never an amateur league. To a degree I agree, but it wasn't an amateur league you'd be hard pressed to convince it was a professional league because simply put: the student's never got paid.
People will say DI athletics were "free labor." That's just the prevalent talking point bandied by people who haven't though it thorough. Instead of a paycheck being processed into their bank account, the student-athletes, in exchange of their labor, had their university tuition and fees paid for. It wasn't "free" - someone's paying their tuitions and fees, it's just that the expenses aren't coming out of their own pocket.
It's like saying American waitresses are working "for free" because they aren't on salary but instead rely on tips for a living. This is simply not true; tips are just a different economic system to get paid. They aren't working "for free" because if they did they would just show up and, well, work for free without any tips. But they don't. They know they're going to get paid - not by the restaurant - but by the customers.
NCAA DI was an amateur league - not entirely, but the players were. The coaches were professional because they did get paid and they were in charge of essentially running a business within a business (team within a department within a university). Then NIL came along and amateur economists tried to convince other that the NCAA DI was never an amateur league, and that the student-athletes are "finally" getting what they deserve - a share of the millions of dollars brought in by their labor. But that's relatively bizarre way to put it. It's straight up straw man when framing the realties of a DI student-athlete. Students aren't employed by the university in the way a coach is - they're "employed" differently.
The millions of dollars brought in by the student-athletes labor was never theirs to begin with because it was never contracted. It never said "if sports program brings in X amount of money you get Y percent of profit." Nope. Never existed. What was promised was a no tuition and fee enforced education in exchange for being a DI athlete. That was the promise. Add in academic tutors, separate living quarters for athletes, separate workout quarters for you, healthcare, and transportation to and from for away games. These are the "benefits."
I will admit a DI student-athlete is an "in-between" type of existence between an amateur and a professional, but it's more amateur than professional. You can't be an unofficial professional though. With that logic, graduate students are unofficial professionals/professors. People who play in recreation sports leagues are unofficial professionals because there's no one who promised to pay them $10 for an hour for their time after work to play dodgeball in the city's park league.
So when I'm on a sports forum seeing posts confidently saying that the student-athletes are "just getting what they're worth" (totally subjective) and, minutes later, discovering that they liked a video posted by another commentator about being pro-union, I know I'm dealing with people who are just surface thinkers. These are the same people who have no issue with students saying DI athletes are slaves because they "work for free." I say this because extolling the nature of free markets and being pro-union is contradictory; it's trying to have your cake and eat it too. Reality says you can't do that. These are the same people that try to display their own integrity by "facing the grittiness of reality" but they want to tear down controversial statues. They want to erase mascots because they're politically incorrect.
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