I just sold our family house in California and am horribly disillusioned by my experience with realtors. The listing agent never showed up after the house went on the market; a few times she took days to return my messages. Not one of the people who visited the house were her clients. She took $25K in commissions and she didn’t even show up for the signing of documents in escrow, claiming covid restrictions.
It’s a racket.
Your experience sounds fairly typical to me. I am always disgusted when we find listings on Zillow, Realtor.com, Trulia, etc... with bad pictures and no helpful descriptions that have been prepared by some lazy “Realtor”. My wife found a house that she was very interested in and we called the listing agent and asked a few basic questions. The listing agent had never been to the house, had no plans to go to the house, would not meet us at the house and basically knew nothing about the house. It had been on the market for months. They were basically just hoping that a buyer's agent would show the house to someone who would make an offer and then they were going to collect their commission. It is different now than it was 40 years ago when most realty professionals felt that they should at least provide some service that entitled them to collect their fee.
Obviously there are some Realtors who work hard and do a good job. But in every rising market you end up with everyone and their brother hoping to make big bucks for nothing. During the lean times they mostly go back to whatever they normally do to coast by. But it is fairly disgusting.