While I appreciate this argument, I feel it's disingenuous.
The reason is that this problem doesn't just apply to banks, it applies to every goddamn service I try to make contact with these days.
The systems are setup to waste a users time so only by showing a large commitment of time and emotional frustration can you get to talk to a human.
The net result is massive waste of everyone's time. It's a race to the bottom situation, and it's a societal problem, companies do it to compete.
But if your competition didn't do this hostile user gaslighting, then you wouldn't either. Or if instead of wasting 30 minutes average time before talking to someone with agency, the time was reduced to 5, or even 10 minutes.
I think the answer is regulation, that the mean or median average for time to speak to a live human should be no more than x (I propose 10 minutes), combined with an ombusdman to report companies that hide behind automated systems instead of do support, and if the average response time goes over allowed limit, or more than y percent of users report a company for not having a way to address their actual problem, then that company should pay a financial penalty, to it's users pro-rata. If the penalty is balanced, this way companies would actually share the cost of the people's time they are wasting.