> Good businesses create a solution to your problem and then "insert themselves" between you and that solution.
I cannot wrap my head around this framing at all. Businesses that provide a solution aren't inserting themselves between anything. They're offering a solution directly.
That's just an incredibly jaded way to look at things. The solution is developed by people who specialize in developing solutions. The communication of the existence of the solution to people who need it is handled by people who specialize in communication and customer outreach, i.e. sales.
You may think that without a sales team the solution would be cheaper; the reality is that without a sales team the solution would either not exist or be substantially less refined as _someone_ has to handle the customer interactions, and if that's the dev than that's taking them away from working on the product.
We view a business as problematic when it's only inserting itself between you and the solution, without actually creating the solution, i.e. rent-seeking. So, it's the relationship between the business and the solution that causes an issue, not the action of putting the business between the solution and the problem. The latter is a given, always.
None of that opinion was conveyed in what you wrote earlier.