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@Lemuion
I think the points you make are all valid and they point to the fact that it doesn't really make sense to talk of publishers en masse any more (did it ever?). I basically read two types of books - academic texts and what I would snobbishly but apologetically call literary fiction.
The academic publishers engage anonymous reviewers to inform their publishing decisions, seem to spend very little on copy editing and charge through the nose for what they expect to be mostly low circulation books. This part of the industry seems intimately tied up with academic career progression and tenure - publish all the papers you want in peer reviewed journals but unless you get a book out every so often you'll likely be stuck with an associate professorship. In some ways it's a classy form of vanity publishing.
With regard to literary fiction, it used to be the case that the publisher was a kind of guarantor of what I was going to find when I encountered a new author. I'm not sure this is true any more.
When it comes to ebooks the situation seems to get even worse - not only can I not rely on publishers to vouchsafe for the quality of what I read, the formatting is likely to be rubbish and they want to dictate to me what I can do with the ebook that I thought I was buying from them but it turns out I was just licensing it. It's in this sense that I meant publishers have to show that they are making a contribution.
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