That would require real effort instead of storytelling during work hours.

Whoch is harsh, but that’s the point. You are going to get far more insight from real customers than you are from one relatively homogenous sub-department’s imaginary beliefs about who your customers might be.

IMO the latter is pretty much the definition of one of David Graeber’s bullshit jobs.

http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-d...

It may make sense, when you have 10 users, but then you can just skip profiling (and, by the way, profiling real users, at least in EU, is strictly limited from legal perspective - it just doesn't worth it). When there are thousands of users, real customer contacts may create unnecessary bias. There's no "average" real person, which means that serving the needs of one real person, you may hurt others too much. Personas are synthetic profiles for a reason: they cover the whole audience of the project or feature.