> It is an entirely for-profit middle-man business run by the journal publishers

Plenty of prominent journals are run by nonprofit organisations - most learned societies have their own journals, for example.

> Journals take and take, and make everyone else pay for things they didn't create, with minimal operating costs -- all they have to do is host the research papers, and print some paper copies.

They also do copyediting, and gatekeeping to keep the cranks out. I agree that there is a lot of profiteering involved, but if the journals were pointless then everyone would just publish on sites like arxiv.

At some level, academics have to take responsibility for this problem. They're the ones who are choosing to pay to publish their work in crappy Springer/Elsevier/Wiley/MDPI journals instead of supporting their own learned societies or setting up their own more responsible publications. They're also the ones who obsess over publications and citations and tell the politicians that that's how they should be judged. This isn't a problem that is being foisted on academia from outside.

> I believe in the US, regulations are being put in place currently that force academic work funded by taxpayer money (a huge share of research funding!) to be made available free of charge to the public within a year.

Yeah, but these policies tend to result in one of two unsatisfactory approaches. Either the academic hosts a version of the paper privately, which often isn't quite the same as the "official" published version and can be hard to track down. Or they publish in an "open-access" journal, which brings its own problems. The open-access model is that you pay a big fee and they publish your article and make it available to everyone. This is basically the same as the vanity press model. Open-access journals have a huge incentive to publish as many papers as possible, and very little incentive to ensure their quality or promote them to a wide audience, exactly like vanity presses. Again, there are plenty of good, non-profit open access journals, but most academics prefer to publish in the endless array of Springer and Elsevier ones.