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Legal Aid is essentially a subsidy to make certain legal services free (or nearly free) to the consumer. Like many subsidies, there are often very good and genuine reasons to support them, including lowering prices to acceptable levels, or protecting a strategic industry that would struggle to survive without them.
However, subsidies by their very definition distort the market, expanding the gap between what consumers are willing to pay for a product, and the price at which producers are willing to sell it.
The rise of paid McKenzie friends gives a snapshot of a part of the market that shows people lower on the socio-economic scale are willing to pay for personal legal services, just not at the prices demanded by solicitors and barristers.
The market is telling us something, and in the absence of the massive subsidy of legal aid, we can either listen to that message and figure out how to lower prices, or go bust.
The answer is not to ban McKenzie friends in order to eliminate competition at the lower end of the market, but figuring out how to offer a service people want at a price they will actually pay for.