This is a naively optimistic view of how knowledge production actually operates. Sure, the scientific endeavor is constrained by what is actually the case (i.e.reality), but without some kind of editorial oversight imposed from above nothing coherent nor useful will be produced. A thousand well-trained, well-intentioned researchers toiling away at a problem will not magically self-organize such that their collective efforts make tangible progress on large, intractable problems. This will be true regardless of how many fancy web2.0/3.0 niceties one throws at the problem, since experience has shown that such solutions only make the problems of social dominance worse, not better. In the end, this sentiment is nearly identical to people complaining about "capitalists".
Do capitalists and academic publishers have purposes to fulfill? Yes. Do they fulfill that purpose well these days? Absolutely not. Like many of our social institutions these days, the people who run them seem to fundamentally misunderstand what their roles are, deferring to some vague, financialized liberalism that believes all problems can be addressed by maximizing human-freedom, with no regard to bootstrapping problems. Because the institution ceases to perform it's role, people begin to believe it has no role. Worse yet, now that people have no idea what the institution's role even is, they have even less of a clue as to how to fix it.