Auteur theory blows ass, it’s literally the great man theory but for media, unless someone physically controlled every aspect and performed every performance in a work, their influence should never eliminate consideration for the whole team involved in crafting the art.

In theory, a director has a team of people they rely on to consistently produce a given style. So, like, John Carpenter and Wes Craven went to these exceptional costume and design specialists to produce all the outfits for their most hideous monster-villains. George Lucas founded a company specifically for lighting and special effects, because he wanted all his movies to have a certain visual flare. James Cameron, similarly, worked with engineers to create very specific techniques for shooting and post-editing.

I agree that the director gets too much individual credit. LucasFilm, Industrial Light and Magic, Marvel Animation, and the like do work far above and beyond what the individual directors can offer. But they exist in large part because these directors establish a film style and need a massive team to consistently reproduce it. It isn't unreasonable to say James Cameron, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Jon Favreau, and the like have created these distinct artistic styles that have become the benchmarks for future films. (Whether you think those styles are good is another question, but they're clearly distinct to what came before and what lacks their firms' input).

It also often paradoxically excuses abusive behavior as “serving the art” when the same theory credits the art as the will of the single person, its all self serving.

In theory, it should reach a point of escaping this excuse, as once you've built a massive franchise around a production studio, you've made yourself redundant. I don't need Spielberg in the room to make a Spielberg-style film. I have an army of film students who grew up on his work and can reproduce it near-perfectly.

But, eventually these students will want to do their own things. They'll have their own ideas with how to employ existing and novel technologies and techniques. And they'll generate their own styles (and, if successful, their own cottage industries) built to replicate those techniques. Coming from the Spielberg school and producing your own original popular distinct work deserves recognition apart from Spielberg.

In theory, we should be able to draw out whole genealogies and celebrate scores of people. Build museums to the legacy and stylistic evolution that was spawned less than a century ago. Give enthusiasts an ocean of talent to appreciate and perhaps even to speculate about what may-have-been based on business or popular turns-of-fate.