Banks do indeed make money "from nothing". If you get a loan of $1000 from a bank, they just add $1000 to your current account, and write down in another account that you owe them $1000. They don't have to "get" this money from somewhere.
This is all as it should be. Say I can make tables, and you want one, but don't have anything to give me in exchange. We can agree that you now owe me $100, say. You can write me an IOU and sign it. Suppose you are trustworthy enough that an IOU from you is considered acceptable as payment. I can now use your IOU as money - we have just "created" $100 money from nowhere (or, $100 debt, same thing).
Quite a bit more, I think.
Like, banks only need about (I think) 9% actual money. So you can lend $9 off that one dollar.
But then that $9 gets deposited somewhere, and that bank can then lend $100-something... etc.
Though I could be mistaken about how fractional reserve banking works.
The difference is that on a large enough scale, you can make a $1 of real savings circulate as though it were $1.50 or (probably a lot more) of circulating currency and there's huge benefits to doing that (when it's backed by real productivity).
The source of things like the 2008 collapse was the dark side of that - trillions of dollars debts, backed by no possible amount of productivity that could repay them (and tons of fraud allowing these to exist on the books).