Not exactly. Economics is all about trading. Trading is all about wants, desires, and needs. If I make something that everyone wants, it is not useless junk, useless junk is something nobody wants. So it's actually very important to have feedback from middlemen who's livelihood is actually tied to successfully making available desirable things.
There's an economic study I remember seeing in the last couple of decades that studied the value of middlemen. The study started with the assumption that middlemen were parasitic entities, especially since so much economic value seems to come from "cutting out the middle man". But the study authors were most surprised about was that the countries they studied that had the most middlemen, also had the greatest number of economic health indicators. That is they found middlemen to be highly correlated with the economic output of an economy. Their conclusion was that it was probably more than correlated, but largely causative and that middle men probably provided a lot more value than they're generally given credit for.
This article seems to be providing some anecdotal data that supports the value of middle men. At the very least they are good at synthesizing back pressure data for factories so they don't end up overproducing, and have to fill landfills with stuff no one wants.