And the great thing about bitcoin is that you don't need to trust them. You can transact with the blockchain directly if you wish. You might as well say that cars are bad because dealers are conmen. The middle men are not an indictment of the technology.
In practice, you're gonna have a really hard time doing stuff without working through an exchange. And statistically, trusting a Bitcoin exchange in any manner is a terrible idea.
I've been using bitcoin for a couple years now and have never went through an exchange. You can easily purchase person to person. Theres an app called Mycelium for this, amongst other services. There are even bitcoin ATMs, which even though they use exchanges, the chance that the exchange collapses in between the time you put in your cash and get your bitcoin is nearly zero.