So that implies that a majority of academics, or at least a portion of them with meaningful power, of academics actually place value on the 'name stamp' that Elsevier and others apply to other researcher's work. They all could just read a PDF from the original researcher's own web page or university's online archive but they choose to prefer the 'Elsevier gated' papers instead. Otherwise people publishing via Elsevier wouldn't "get much" either.

The question is whether that pays off in the end. That is, do Elsevier and others' papers have the bar high enough that it's absolutely not worth browsing and reading papers outside the commercial publication, or if it's just laziness and convenience acting up by placing trust in these academic publishers. The academics should be aware of the money and power game involved in commercial publishing, so they should be in a position to judge whether there is value to be trusted in it.

Well, it's not so much about the readers of the research (especially in some disciplines, most of them access articles through arXiv), but about the academics on tenure track of grant application committees. They're not actually going to read the research of the hundreds of applicants they have to judge, but will rather rely on proxy measures such as the journals they have published in.

See e.g. https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laurea...

In some sense gatekeeping is essential - for example, one might want to skim all recent accepted papers from the top venues of a particular domain but skimming all submitted papers from all venues in the same domain is physically impossible, even if that would be a full time job doing nothing else. You do need the community to read all the proposed papers and throw away the majority of them, and sort others into lower-ranked publications focused on a narrow niche which you read only if that niche matters to you.

So publishing on your own site on arxiv isn't sufficient on it's own, some curation and gatekeeping is essential for academic publishing to work. However, this is not a service that Elsevier et al provides for their payments, this service is provided by uncompensated reviewers from the community.

On the other hand, the ratings are used by the evaluators of science e.g. funding agencies which won't (and can't) evaluate results directly but need some trusted proxy to separate random ramblings from acceptable science, and the prestigeous journals fulfil that function.

The fact that they put the 'name stamp' is due, essentially, to the referees that allow that paper to be published. Refereeing is also part of the CV of a researcher. So, unless you find another way to do the refereeing process, there is no alternative to the 'name stamp'.

Just uploading to the arxiv will not guarantee that your paper has been reviewed.