If, for newcomers, there was literally nothing else you could do, short of obtaining a compatible bachelors degree (another form of certification), to prepare for entry into the field, then yes, it would be unhelpful and inaccurate to say that certification is entirely useless.

But there are other things you can do, and so the effort involved in acquiring a certification --- even if an employer is paying for it --- has to be weighted against those other things. Research, open source development, writing, CTFs, keeping abreast of research, networking (even just "going to Defcon" --- and I don't like Defcon!), investing more time in researching career opportunities, bug bounties... these things all have a much higher payoff than certification does, and any time you spend pursuing a certification is coming at the expense of those other things.

It's also letting you kid yourself about the work and whether it's a fit for what you want to be doing, because one thing you should notice about that random list of things I just generated is that it covers a lot of what infosec people actually do. A certification process provides structure and forcing functions and activation energy (for a dumb process that won't get you any meaningful advantage professionally). But if you can't generate that kind of activation energy yourself, in this climate, with this many available resources, with the kinds of career payoffs people are regularly obtaining, maybe this isn't really what you want to be doing?