Market making is indeed a useful activity, in isolation. And market making is indeed technically what HFT companies do.

However, pouring unspeakable amounts of money, watts and person-hours into completely unnecessary and wasteful infrastructure just because emergent properties of a system mean that billion dollar companies and their owners can make a lot of money by being a picosecond faster than each other in an eternal battle is of extremely questionable utility.

What exactly do we as a society get in exchange?