If you ignore SEO, someone in your organization will eventually bring in snake oil SEO to fill the void. It is indeed amazing.
There are plenty of tricks, gimmicks, and zero-day hacks whose effect may be as short as a couple of hours, but indisputably, there are many SEO customers who see real increase in search rankings. That's why SEO is still a thing -- it works, at least enough of the time to make it a worthwhile risk.
If you ignore the business's desire to dominate Google results, then yeah, it's no surprise that someone eventually recognizes and attempts to fill the gap. It's best to address these inevitable interests directly so you don't get cut out from the process.
This is obviously a different situation than 10-15 years ago, but there still are so many companies who are still trying to pay for services that made sense in that era.
You certainly do need to attend to business needs. I work at an agency and that’s a big part of my job. I’ve recommended “implementing an SEO program” many times because that’s what will get a budget to do work that will lead to improve searches. It’s not SEO, though, just the Ship of Theseus described above, sold using a term that prevents useless or harmful SEO from being purchased elsewhere.
I would say that backlinks are still a hugely important part of "SEO" (with or without the scare quotes).
Companies run things called "Private Blog Networks" so that properties under their control can backlink to each other and get the PageRank bumped. Discerning PBN's place on the spectrum between Public Relations and just outright "link buying" basically depends on how charitable you're feeling that day.
This is the shtick of every big SEO business: "Of course SEO doesn't work, so we don't do SEO! We optimize your position in search engines through good old-fashioned $UNTAINTED_TASK_NAMES!" The point is that it's activity explicitly targeted at gaming search results, and thus, "Search Engine Optimization".
The only way to make it more difficult for dishonest people to make a buck on this would be for Google to get a lot more explicit about how it formulates its rankings, which, for obvious reasons, they don't. As long as there's no objective measurement or standard, there will be no real way to be sure that the techniques employed by a specific vendor 1) work at all; and 2) are ethically satisfactory. Someone with a backdoor at Google, after all, could make a pretty penny. It'd be naive to pretend like such things are never attempted at an org the size of Google.
People will take advantage of every hack they can to get Google to rank them more highly; as long as that's true, not only will the SEO marketplace thrive, but people will be identifying and exploiting those hacks.
There's a been a movement to have better optics / positioning for SEO products that appeal to the main stream buyers (eg. your folks that work at Macys or Credit Karma). That's why well polished tools that are priced higher like Botify, DeepCrawl, Clearscope, etc. are coming to market and doing quite well.