This. Though also worth noting: these agents are often working with the same small pool of other agents throughout their career. Their relationship with them is often more valuable than with any individual client, so it doesn't really pay for them to be adversarial on behalf of their client. Both agents are incentivized to keep a healthy working relationship and focus on closing the sale despite the commission percentage.

right and their negotiations are likely synthetic and geared towards mass deal making, which distorts the market in nuclear ways.

if we're all for transparent markets, these commissions interfere and it doesn't matter how close to reality they are as we can agree that they're largely not real, but synthetic amalgamations of something not related to the market.