How much would you pay to somebody to ensure that a big evil corporation is not cheating their ~10M customers by $10/year (100M/year in total)? $10M? $50M?
This doesn't mean it's the ideal solution to widespread consumer harm, but it's a tool we have at our disposal NOW instead of hypothetical legislation or regulation we might have at some point in the future...
>In reality, lawyers collect a small portion compared with consumers, and only if they succeed. For every $10 that a company pays out for wrongdoing, we found about $8 goes to consumers and $2 goes to pay legal costs.
Of course we could take issue with this study, but unless someone can present some evidence in its favor the notion that only the lawyers ever profit from class actions seems like received wisdom "everyone just knows".