I have sent multiple international wires over the years and money always goes missing either from the sending/receiving fees, or the intermediary bank in New York takes a small cut.
Maybe if you have an account with billions of $$$ then you get a special deal, but us normies have to pay.
Sure, when Alice pays Bob, Bob pays Charlie, and Charlie pays Alice a small amount of money a lot of it cancels out. But not all, and over millions of transactions one bank can end up owing another a lot of money. You have to cash out at some point, as banks hate trusting people with money for no interest. So banks then resort to armored vehicles full of cash and gold bars so they can square up.
When they're moving money they balance the cost of additional security against the risk of loss and that's what gets reflected in the bill for the bank wire.
Sent a few thousand dollars from my Fidelity account to a Frankfurt-based friend’s UBS account last week. Zero fees. Note that I sent, and they received U.S. dollars. I believe they incurred about a dollar of slippage in the FX conversion to Euros.
I have never paid for a wire. I’ve also overseen multibillion-dollar wires for which there were zero transfer fees.
If you send and receive wires, get a bank account that doesn’t charge for them. (This is almost every account at e.g. Fidelity or First Republic.) Consumer accounts usually optimise for a different basket of needs than large instantaneous transfers. If that is something you care about, there are a myriad of options superior to Bitcoin.