I believe that most business owners will prefer to transact money transfers with their customers directly without using an exchange, that will be a third party, and you'll have to pay this third party or middle man money for his services, whether you like it or not. I also believe that nothing beats transacting money directly with your clients or customers, no third party whatsoever. One of the reasons why I like bitcoin is that it's decentralized, and you can do a P2P transaction with another bitcoin holder without any exchange being involved. But for convenience, transparency and scams that are associated with P2P, you don't have much choice but to patronize the services of these exchanges.
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.
Indeed, you cannot deny the middleman's importance when dealing with an anonymous person on the internet. Reputation is a key factor there. If you can build a solid online reputation, you will likely get the payment or product first. This applies only to public forums like BitcoinTalk and hack forums. Still, this forum has middleman services to eliminate the possibility of scams.
The fact is, forum middlemen do not ask for your private information like your Real name, Identity or your electricity bills. But when you deal with some specific platforms like Binance and other centralized platforms, you compromise your private information.
Correct, on this forum the middleman only cares about being a middleman and as such their existence is not only tolerated but encouraged if you are making a transaction with an user you have never dealt before, however the middlemen that we find on the fiat system want to know every single thing they can about you, and not only this robs you from your privacy, it also puts you at risk as those middlemen keep that information forever and they only need to be hacked once in order for your information to end up on the black markets.