You do need middlemen. The middleman is whatever service you must use to convert btc or eth to local currency which will actually be accepted for payments.
The question is whether Bitcoin and Ethereum have provided value. "Have" means in the past up to and including the present.
You are implicitly agreeing with the statement that Bitcoin is only speculative, by admitting that it will only be useful without middlemen in a hypothetical future where it achieves wide adoption.
Bitcoin is useless for any legitimate business. The costs of using it vastly exceed any benefits.
A lot of dopes who think they’re smarter than the tax-man because they’ve been evading taxes by using bitcoin are going to have a ‘Martin Shkreli’ moment in the next few years.