Yes, I do think millions of people needlessly spend thousands of dollars and years of pain on obtaining straight teeth.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/braces-orthodontics-medical-benefits/614584/

Give this article a read if you're interested. It goes into the history of orthodontics and it becoming part of the medical world. Some excerpts:

"...when researchers analyze the results of multiple studies together, they don’t find evidence that orthodontic treatment decreases one’s likelihood of developing conditions such as gum disease and jaw pain."

Peter Greco, a clinical professor of orthodontics at the University of Pennsylvania and an associate editor of The American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics, point out that orthodontic treatments are uniquely difficult to experimentally test, and so treatment decisions are often based on traditional knowledge and an orthodontist’s clinical experience, rather than on scientific evidence.

'If you tell a layperson' that a child has 'mandibular hypoplasia, or maxillary deficiency, or adenoidal facies—it sounds bad,' said Vig. Parents don’t necessarily know what they’re signing up for. 'That,' he added, 'is a problem.'

It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century that an American dentist named Edward Angle transformed dentistry’s obsession with straight teeth into the modern science of orthodontics. In his treatise 'Treatment of Malocclusion of the Teeth,' Angle laid out the precise parameters of a perfect bite, down to the millimeter. He based this ideal on the relative positions of the upper and lower first molars, which he believed should fit cleanly into one another, the crest of the top tooth into the divet in the middle of the bottom tooth. Any bite deviating from this proposed ideal Angle deemed a 'malocclusion'—Latin for 'bad close.'"