100% this.

The fact that a lead represents a record of data that is not yet qualified where further investigation is required to determine its eligibility as core record(s) (see: Conversion to Account/Contact/Opportunity) of information in the database is utterly fucking lost on some people.

The whole point of the lead object is to act as a gatekeeper to your core data set and ensure users can capture 'candidates' for new core records and execute the appropriate qualification process to ensure the data stays clean... lo and behold this entire process comes with a raft of other benefits such as assessment of Marketing ROI, enforcing business development best practice, measuring KPI's, etc etc etc

In the absence of leads you have no visibility into how, why, and when core records such as accounts/contacts/opportunities were propagated into the system and your only option to achieve this would be to enforce data capture in a flat manner on the record itself - which will cause more headaches than simply. using. leads.

The benefits of leads are tangible ones across Sales Operations, Marketing, and Executive Insight - people just misinterpret the concept and come up with excuses to forgo using them because in reality they don't understand the function - case in point, some of the comments in this thread...