Except this concept appears to be about making chores fun for kids before they can even do those chores properly.
Which is clearly different than kids “earning their keep” which presumes they’re at an age that they can actually successfully and competently do those tasks.
I have friends, who are adults, who have never cooked. If I put them in my kitchen tomorrow and expected them to feed themselves, they'd be eating burned cereal and cold beans.
Kids always have inherently less context in a situation. They'll get the context when you give it to them, but they just take a bit more time to ramp up. That doesn't mean you shouldn't teach them - since if you don't teach them now they won't magically know in a decade or two.
But is it really critical to make chores feel fun for the kids?
By definition, chores are routine tasks, and it's natural for kids and adults to feel them as "not fun". I believe it's important to make kids realize that for the household to run successfully, we have to do them despite them being "not fun".
Having to do work that is not fun is an important life skill. Children should have lots of play time, but "work" needs to be understood. You do it even if you don't like it because nobody else will do it for you.
"Play" is the psychological/biological term for how children (of all species) learn important life skills by naturally finding them fun. Now that important life skills aren't obvious/instinctive because society is so complex, making those complex skills fun is the way to integrate them into the child's natural humanity. We don't need to make children miserable just for misery's sake out of some Puritanical ethic.
Nobody is saying to overload a child until they are unhappy. But the lesson needs to be learned that even if they don't naturally find it fun it still has to be done.
> Except this concept appears to be about making chores fun for kids
Not really, you extrapolated that. It's about getting them to do chores early. But real ones, and giving them some leeway even if they are not 'really' providing value yet.
Which is clearly different than kids “earning their keep” which presumes they’re at an age that they can actually successfully and competently do those tasks.