It takes a long time for cultures to shift and for people to start to trust information systems to entirely replace high touch stuff like that. And at some level there will always be some white glove service on top for special cases.
but for long time in the US you were "forced" to hire a real estate agent, if you wanted to get the market price.
Refer to the NAR settlement that pretty much admits to this.
https://www.realestatecommissionlitigation.com/
This is not to say that real estate agents cannot add value to a process; it is just that they were a cartel with anticompetitive practices.
The mandated and fixed 6% on each sale was and is ridiculous, when the median sell price is 400K in the US ... that is 24K commission
simply put the cost of selling a home should not be linearly related to the cost of the house,
and especially should not be a fixed constant across the entire country