They go to those who can steer future purchases: travel office employees on personal trips, etc. That's a form of a soft kickback. The $50 tickets due to an airline making a bad demand forecast and running a fire sale on unsold tickets will not disappear.

Disney is doing similar stuff with their app and queuing nonsense.

Actually if I ran an airline I’d try to prevent everyone from being able to snipe the best seats with their agents as soon as they came out. Using lotteries, special manual two factor authentication etc.

The effort you (and others) are willing to go to get the $50 doesn't seem to match up with the "fine, the practice should go". If it doesn't matter, why expend effort to do it?

If agents make finding cheaper tickets trivial and the default, customers lose that choice.

Of course everyone wants the $50 tickets, so the market gets all weird trying to both fill flights and charge as much as possible, while being competitive with other airlines that are trying to do the same thing. Because there are competing airlines, the final margins stay low, so the airlines are barely "maximizing" profits so much as they are simply maintaining profitability.

But once the company starts defining "worthy of cheap tickets" groups the system becomes very murky; and murky systems impose costs on everyone.