You may be right, but knowing "who's who" is very largely how general business gets done. Buying services over the internet from an anonymous black box with no support is a recent disruption.
No, normally you didn’t have to know someone in the C suite to “get business done”. That’s totally unscalable.
What’s a recent development is the complete lack of support when shit goes south. Back when you were interacting with real reps you had people that could see when stuff was obviously wrong and escalate appropriately.