If they told you the company, what would stop you from just bypassing the recruiter and going straight to the company?
If the whole arrangement is laid out such that there's a semi-adversarial relationship between the person who has the opening and the person who's trying to fill it, count me out. That situation will infect any interaction that comes out of it.
Seriously though, I think this is false logic by the recruiters. Most people will go through the channel that's open to them, where they have been contacted. They're not going to try and find the right contact at the company. There's a tradeoff between people going around you and people ignoring you. I think ignoring is a bigger problem. A job that consists of keywords for an unspecified company with an unspecified salary is just not noticeable.
Also, if you use the relationship right, recruiters will do a lot of the upfront work for you.
Also, a lot of recruiters are not retained but work on contingency, so they're at best arms-length from the companies they "work" for - it's questionable how "inside" they are. Going with them may not confer as much of an advantage to getting the job as one might think.
In any case, I feel like tech recruiting is a poor solution that encompasses two problems: job discovery, and candidate discovery. Recruiting is effective at the latter, but oftentimes is used to fulfill the former.
Do you have evidence of that?
Anecdotally that has not been my experience. While recruitment fees are taken into consideration, between choosing a locally sourced vs 3rd party source candidate, it has had no bearing on salaries.
As an employer, the trifling cost of a referral that leads to a hire doesn't even enter into the conversation. Any candidate who would go around a recruiter (regardless of the fact that their reasoning is misguided) is demonstrating bad faith already, and I would not hire them.
Perhaps, but not always. I've been in a situation previously where I felt that the recruiter was not working in my best interest and decided to contact the hiring manager directly.