Publishing in Academia is a scam. Nowadays everyone puts their papers also on arxiv.org so at least we can read each other's papers for free. While of course still paying the fees to these publishers who are doing nothing but messing up the PDF (I have to fight them to fix the mistakes they add every time a paper is published), while claiming to do a value-add, which happens to add value to nobody but their own pockets. It's a scam through and through.

Of course one has to examine why this system is still in place. And it's mostly to do with policies in universities, where certain journals/conferences are valued more, and changing that is hard, because e.g. Springer happens to own the name. So we all pay millions to Springer, for the use of this name (that we, together, made great, not Springer), and in return, they charge us the privilege of reading the papers that we reviewed, edited, and wrote. It's insane, but it can't be changed as long as universities refuse to change.

So the hard truth is, it's not Springer/IEEE/Nature/etc, it's ultimately, us.