You think this is literally never the case? Raising VC money has never helped a company significantly?

They might help a lot, but they also take a lot of equity. Let's say you alone might get the company to a 10 million valuation, if you're good. Well, the VCs will help you get it to 100 million, but they'll take 95%.

Those numbers are very inaccurate.

But in general, yes - VCs give something and it costs something, like almost everything else in life and certainly in business. It's your job as an entrepreneur to decide if that money is "worth it". Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. In the end, just like borrowing money, it's a tool that you have to decide on as an entrepreneur. It's a big decision, maybe one of the biggest at first, but one of many thousands of decisions you have to make every day.