I'm in the process of selling right now and I can assure you you are wrong. I got a realtor out of fear that I would be missing out on buyers simply as a punishment for not going through the realtor system. After getting astonishingly little value out of the realtor for what would have been an almost 10k seller fee, I fired them and I did a flat fee listing service, and I'm seeing about the exact same foot traffic.

I have still left the 10k buyers agent fee because you will DEFINITELY be blacklisted by the buyer side agents if you don't pay their fee. So basically I'm paying 10k in cartel bribes to get my house shown to people who could have easily found it on their own on zillow or redfin.

The only reason people are going through agents is out of fair of being screwed over by agents who will push them out.