Nothing like hearing it straight from the horse's mouth

Some brokers can be scum, yes
The critical part is when shippers don't want to manage finding trucks and dealing with monitoring the shipment. We've had carriers directly go to the customers to offer services and had the shippers say "yeah, I get that cutting out the middle man seems cheaper. We pay to not have to deal with finding carriers, monitoring their insurance and authority, dealing with carriers that won't use the portal we require for billing etc. Onboard with our broker if you want to haul our freight." All of that regulation monitoring and carrier procurement is more expensive than just hiring a broker to do it for them. It's risk mitigation and cheaper for most shippers.