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The 200 million figure is nonsense, Toyota spend around 40-50mil when they started, and even at the height of Audi-Porsche arms race it edged around 100 million for the Japanese - which would still be about 75% less than what is spend at the top of F1 today. Furthermore if these factory teams would do a reduced schedule around Le Mans - much like Audi and Peugeot in 2009/2010 - I'm sure it could have been reduced greatly, without resorting to cost capping and other external artificiality

Of course the OEMs are going to demand easy & cheap (not to mention bending regulations to their own favor) if they know the organizers are gonna lean to that. I mean why wouldn't they. Once you start pleasing the crowd to the level of extreme, it becomes the expected behavior you can't really back away from anymore. That's how pro-am and balance of performance completely took over sportscar racing in a timespan of just a decade, and that's exactly how the top class of Le Mans also collapsed into whatever it is now.