not exactly. You can of course still get existing works by pirating them.

But if the Tolkien works entered the public domain, anyone could use them for any creative purposes freely. And yes, a lot of the new material would be trash. But some excellent works would appear to.

A good example of this is Lovecraft’s works and the Cthulhu Mythos, that although not public domain until recent years, Lovecraft encouraged others to use his own creations on their own stories, thus expanding the literary universe of his own creation. Some stories are awful, but there has also been a ton of great works based on Lovecraft’s creations that couldn’t have existed otherwise.