Yeah, humans are social animals which create social systems everywhere they go. This shouldn’t shock anyone.

Woah, no one I know has ever paid a publishing fee. Where are you publishing? Anywhere that asks for money is a scam journal. Also, a PhD is fully funded by nature, so all fees for anything should come from your program.

Do you not write the publishing fees into your grant proposals? And the paywall is just to access through the journal, you can generally just email the author and they will send you a PDF of the work - because the whole point is for the work to be known about and referenced in more work, which can only be done if it's read. The work being in the journal means that it's been peer-reviewed and is scientifically rigorous (which is part of what the fee covers)

To put it bluntly, science costs money, and persuading people who control money to spend that money is itself a skill.

Or, zooming out, science requires resources: physical commodities, equipment, the skilled labor of entire teams. The most effective way to marshal those resources is with money, and management/sales skills are necessary to get those resources working together in concert.

I'm trying to imagine a job where being a disagreeable antisocial recluse is an advantage and I'm coming up blank.