Yeah but why should anyone care about earnings in this exact year? P/E might be useful for your thought experiment about the genie but it's completely useless as a tool to value companies.
What I am saying is that P/E is based on current year earnings. It can be quite low but the company is terrible (Intel) or quit big but the company is great but chose not to cash out yet (Amazon from a few years ago). You should care about how much the company is likely to make in coming decades. How much they have made in a current year is a useless metric for that.
Profits are not the only thing either. Some assets give political power or power to shape the world. If NVidia made 0 it would still be very valuable because of that.