Capitalism requires informed customers. Without that, there is no sense in competing on quality. Advertising (in the broadest sense) is essentially the only way for a new player with a superior product to get the word out.

That is far from the only way advertising is used, but it is a rather important role.

That's just propaganda. The word on good products will spread by Word of mouth. Advertising is an indicator that the product in question is garbage and overpriced.

This is just untrue. You can have a quality product but just starting out without customers. You could be a niche market in a local area (I'm in this bucket) where paid advertising (usually search) is the only way to get the word out.

I don't believe I'm "emotionally hacking people" by paying Google to put our phone number and a few snippets of text in front of potential customers.

You're right. This kind of advertising isn't ideal but definitely not useless either. And GP explicitly wrote "in the broadest sense" which I missed.

Indeed.

Has a perfect valid use, hence we can't "close the bug" by removing marketing completely.

If we're talking about things that capitalism requires, one is perfect information. Is advertising closer to perfect information than never hearing about products?

edit: I should say, is advertising closer to perfect information than word of mouth? I guess that's subjective.

Advertising isn't the only way of hearing about products. Newspapers (for goods with a wide audience) and specialized magazines can serve this need. While advertisers try to give customers (mis-)information that makes them buy $PRODUCT, magazines (that are paid for by the customers) are incentivized to give them useful information that helps them make good decisions. That's a clear win.

Classified-like ads may be better than nothing. But the average ad is worse than useless. What information do we gain from, say, an ad for Coca-Cola? None at best since we already know it exists. More likely, we learn to associate it with happy, healthy, fit young people. Our rational mind may know this association is bullshit. But there are some very stupid people in the world and our emotional minds don't really take orders from our intellect anyway. Never hearing about a product frequently is better than advertising.