It varies a LOT by discipline. There are niches where OA already won and for-profit journals are essentially irrelevant, or even where the entire paper publication mechanism is just a legacy used only for dick-measuring contests and to ration funding - all the real work happens as GitHub PRs, or as mail to a mailing list maintained by some random guy or a Facebook group or something (Warning: Examples somewhat facetious).

But there are also niches where the reality is that key people are happy as Elsevier Journal editors, and they function as gatekeepers, and for the foreseeable future the only route forward in those disciplines will be to get published in those high impact Elsevier Journals.

Because of this variation, lots of people can't do anything. It's a highly distributed problem. No amount of Computer Science professors however prestigious can change how Social Sciences do journals. And we shouldn't want it any different, even though in this case it kinda sucks.