Creators who pay for this view Facebook and Instagram as critical parts of how they generate income. One of the brands I work for spent tens of thousands of dollars on advertising via FB and IG but we never got access to a real person. Issues come up, things don't work like they should and you have nobody to speak with. When they didn't have the good sense to assign ad accounts to a rep and instead leave it to some algorithm that refused to verify our brand account despite us fulfilling all the requirements and worse, having fake accounts tricking our customers – the entire point of verified brand accounts – we took our money elsewhere.
Getting verified for $12.99/month and access to a human is a bargain. The bad news for Zuckerberg is that we've settled our ad budget somewhere else where we're happy and they'll never get the tens of thousands they were getting before. Just $12.99.
On closing, this really isn't for regular users. Why would you want to spend an ongoing monthly fee on a site you just visit to scroll through cat videos? This is for accounts that maintain a business presence, whether for retail, marketing or simply a public persona for a personal brand that generates revenue elsewhere.