You can not eliminate the middle man in businesses, especially in this digital age, be it fiat or cryptocurrencies, because they have come to stay. Big exchanges like Binance, are cashing in on being the middle man in businesses, an unavoidable indirect business associates, in your face, waiting for you to go through them.
Exactly mate I agree absolutely with you and no matter how we paint it, the middle men which are the exchanges are in one way or the other inevitable and I've always seen several threads preaching against exchanges and after closer observations, I noticed that what they reay preach against is storing on those exchanges and not trading on them.
Over the years, exchanges have made transacting with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general much more easier and even more secure through their escrow services and at the end, crypto is traded for fiat in cases where bitcoin isn't accepted and one of the safest way to do this is through P2P on exchanges.
In cryptocurrency, we have many ways to safely resist ay third party influence in what we do as long as we have the knowledge on how to go about it, bitcoin is not what we can just assume to be thesame as the way we treat other cryptocurrencies which are centralized, using bitcoin privately begin with the kind of wallet we use, many people will create a crypto account and take that as wallet from the exchanges they use, while some will rely on other people in helping them through what they would have learnt to know by themselves.
Well whatever the case be, I think the exchanges are inevitable except in cases where the transaction is to be made directly in cryptocurrency or bitcoin as the preference maybe.