Yes! Revisionist future - love it!

It is of course about truth. That’s easier a given than the reason for stories. I’ve listened with fascination to Jordon Peterson discussing how truth has been disseminated through stories as a medium of choice since time immemorial. It’s also the reason why people write poetry. It’s not the narrative; it’s the attempt to capture elusive truth. To trap it when it’s not looking, so to speak.
Perhaps it’s true to say that stories and poetry have had their day as vehicles of truth. I’m thinking that in the case of books, narrative and truth are now separated in reading material, i.e. placed in the fiction or the psychology section of the bookstore. Poetry books still sell but I think to a niche market.
Maybe the reason is that the purpose of words has become to disseminate facts, not truth, information but not meaning. The recent descent into the verbal abyss has been the total disconnect between words and meaning, never mind words and truth.