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Throwing the baby out with the bath water over a few bad actors has consistently failed and left people far, far worse off. You don't even need to look far back in history to see examples, South American countries were still obsessed with the Bolivarian idea of "capitalism is the root problem" nonsense well into the 2000s... until they ran out of money which masked the unsustainability of their alternative, like we're now seeing in Ecuador and other countries.
The protests in Ecuador are about IMF austerity measures. The sort of cruel anti-working class policy we've been seeing peddled by neo-liberals for a long time. The sort of policy that is now seeing a resurgent fascism and socialism.
I'm sure the government can find better ways to pay the money back but it's still a massive burden put onto an already struggling economy which didn't have to exist.
For instance, will those who support capitalism as it is be willing to support for massive estate taxes? Increase the social safety net? Push for greater access to quality education? Otherwise then it just perpetuates the "there is no alternative" narrative that keeps the status quo as it is.
Hell, sometimes you can’t even get basic government services with “knowing someone”.
Look up historical anarchist movements like the commune of Paris, or in more modern days the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (unlike what news coverage would have you believe, they're not just "Kurdish rebels"). Or if you want a quick read, check out their founding principles by reading Öçalan's brochure about Democratic Confederalism. Or for something less grandiose, just look into anarcho-syndicalism and workers' cooperatives.
It's not that alternative models haven't been tried yet, it's just that building egalitarian grassroots democratic structures within capitalist nation states is nearly impossible and even when you manage to do so, you now have to figure out how to interact with the rest of the world and prevent them from ending you.
Let's be realistic: the United Nations isn't exactly going to take interest in an autonomous territory that intentionally rejects nationhood. And if foreign powers (even the "socialist" nation states) have any political, economical or military interest in your territory, things are unlikely to end well for you.
Even if they somehow wound up in a magical perfect coop start state without rivals centralization would emerge and prevail yet again unless there were extremly significant changes to ensure different outcomes.
When people are saying capitalism is the problem that doesn't mean they're advocating for Soviet style state capitalism or "socialist" nation states. Not every anticapitalist is a Marxist-Leninist, especially in recent years.
I'm not endorsing this argument one way or another, just saying that hierarchies as they exist now are not inevitable, and the act of presuming that there is no alternative is an act of lack of imagination.
But the key difference is that the authority granted to these leaders is conditional and temporary. If the group loses their faith in the leader or the leader is no longer absolutely necessary, they can fall back to the democratic process again.
Likewise in federal communal structures an individual commune or neighborhood can always object and, if its members don't feel adequately represented, secede without threats of violence.
We recognise this level of autonomy in super-national structures like the European Union (hence the discussions around "Brexit" and such), yet we seem to treat them as unthinkable within a nation and any mention of autonomy at the communal level is easily seen as absurd. This is because nationhood has become our widespread cultural norm to the point we can rarely even entertain the notion of an alternative or a time before or after nation states.
Anarchism doesn't say there should be nobody in charge, just that authority should be as limited as possible and only seen as temporary and conditional.
Nation states centralise power. Even supposedly democratic nation states routinely follow policies the majority of their citizens disagrees with. Even disregarding the problems with first-past-the-post election systems, individual voters or even voter blocks have hardly any way to have their views represented or hold their representatives immediately accountable.
Capitalism exacerbates this problem because it consolidates wealth and at scale (think billionaires, not millionaires) that wealth is equivalent to political power, allowing individuals and corporations to control politicians and thus policy, both by directly influencing individual politicians and by influencing public opinion to place "their" politicians in positions of power.
Democratic Confederalism for instance embraces a communalist "free association" model of autonomous neighborhoods collaborating as communities and so on. Ultimately you still end up with federal super-structures but all power rests at the base rather than the top.
The usual counter argument is "that is nice, but this can never work in practice" or "this can't scale" but in practice it does. Look into the Mondragon Corporation (a coop of currently ~75k workers) or the political structure of the Autonomous Administration of North East Syria (Rojava).
Another typical argument is that they don't look very different from the outside or are practically identical with the current systems if you squint really hard and tilt your head sideways: that is intentional. The differences become apparent when there are conflicts of interest or other times of crisis.