I would not be so extreme: they used to be a necessary evil before the Internet became mainstream. They are more of a millstone from the past that research still drags with it because changing an institution is hard.
It's not that changing is hard, since it would be easy if that's what everyone wanted. It's that you have many competing forces (perhaps that's what you mean by "hard"). The most important is scientists who made their careers in the current system--the people who publish yearly in Nature, for example. They have tremendous political sway and it is not in their interest to change. They will even admit that it is not an ideal system, but no one likes giving up being King.
Edit: I should point out that it is more complicated. Science does need a way to judge which scientists are doing valuable work and which aren't, and currently Impact Factors are one of the main ways this is done now. We don't yet have a great alternative.
Every scientist I've ever met wants as many people as possible to read (and cite) their work. But the main issue is that the main metric for scientists' performance is number of publications in prestigious journals, and the oldest journals tend to be the most prestigious ones. If a scientist wants to get grant funding or promotions, they have to put up with the copyright terms of the traditional publishers.
Any real change to the system has to start from the government agencies and councils handing out grant funding to research groups. As long as they prefer to fund people with Nature papers over SomeOpenAccessJournal papers, only a few scientists are willing to sacrifice their career for the principle of open access.
At the end of the day, nobody is holding a gun to the heads of professors forcing them to publish in these journals. These are freely-negotiated agreements between researchers and publishers. The reason researchers continue to support the existing system is that it serves their purposes and furthers their careers. Any alternative system will have to provide similar benefits.
70 cents on the dollar delivered immediately in cash beats the heck out of 100 cents on the dollar transferred to a debt-collection agency, worked for 6 months, and negotiated down to 60 cents of which the agency keeps 15.
Nature (and others) are (in theory) peer reviewed journals with lends a sense of credibility that self publishing doesn't have.
If it's a business, then it's a business full of tyrannic monopolies. Science publishers are essentially leeching public money, because government funding goes only to people who publish through those publishers. That is a perpetual loop that is impossible to break, since scientists are incentivized (with public money) to publish through established journals. That is not 'clean' business like any other.
OTOH, open access doesn't mean that one has to do away with all the established journals, just that they have to make their content open to everyone. There are other ways to cover their operating costs, like charging for publishing (a better model, in which scientists have an incentive to choose the journal that offers the best value/money).
We can talk about problems we perceive and try to solve them, or we can sit around saying things are complicated. Let's do the first one.
You probably consider yourself neither stupid nor evil - try to remember this when it's your turn to be "disrupted"...
You're right - I don't consider myself stupid or evil. But if I ever do become those things and it hurts others, whether I realise it or not, I hope someone forces me to stop.
One particular search engine or one particular social network wouldn't be missed if gone, but I bet search engines and social networks would be missed if they all went away completely (and it would also be pretty bad if the Internet shut down entirely).
The work itself obviously is not[0], but you need somebody to synchronise that stuff, especially to ensure reviews remain anonymous (to paper authors). This must be handled by a third party.
[0] not entirely true for edition, publishers generally employ a number of editors although these editors usually have a solid science background for obvious reasons.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HD-BEaVeDdFjjCNFkb0j3pvw...
Admittedly I believe we could develop a much better system for doing this then academic publishing, but I don't honestly know what such a system would look like.