Historically, you only paid for that service when you bought something, since most stores can't convince you to pay an entrance fee. When you go to the store to select products and then buy online, you're leeching on that service and putting the entire business model at risk. If everyone did that, brick-and-mortars would go out of business and you wouldn't have access to that service, which sucks for everyone.
I do think that by not having physical stores, it directly/indirectly promoted a decline of product quality as well as misrepresentation of product, with Wish and Temu kinda exemplifying that to an extreme. Price differentiation is way greater now which I guess is a net positive to the consumer.
As a brand owner of midtier kitchen products (cheaper versions of designer OXOish products, but more expensive than your baseline Walmart stuff), our products look visually similar enough to both ends of quality, but shines more when a person gets to interact with the items themselves, feel the product texture, press the lever action, etc. So I do value B&M for their place in the economy and want to make sure they can have some margin (even though I'm selling the same thing in my Amazon store and Shopify and can make more money there).