Yeah, absolutely. In the Wells Fargo case, thousands of dollars were on the line, so it was absolutely worth the couple hundred dollars for the lawyer. But if I had been disputing a $50 overdraft fee or something like that, I'm not sure what I would have done.
(I might contact the CFPB these days, but I think this incident was before they existed.)
The CFPB is completely useless. I've never received a worthwhile response to any complaint I submitted through them, out of the ten or so complaints I've submitted to them in the last ~decade.
They simply forward your complaint to the same barely-literate customer "service" department that created the problem in the first place, so that someone who doesn't understand the problem can cut-and-paste their original response back to you again.
You're given an opportunity to respond after that. You get no response if you explain why the bank's reply wasn't responsive to your complaint. I also once tried cutting-and-pasting several paragraphs of hard-core gay erotic Star Trek fan-fiction (searching-and-replacing one of the main characters' names for that of the bank's CEO, with a note that said, "this is to test if anyone actually reads this"), hoping to get the bank or CFPB to even acknowledge me in a non-automated fashion. I got no indication that they did; not even a "please don't do that again." (I wasn't bold enough to try death threats or child porn, but I'd wager even those would be ignored.)
I wrote my senators and representative in Congress, asking them why the CFPB seemingly ignored complaints. One of them CC'd me on a letter to the CFPB requesting someone contact me. Noone ever did. As far as I can tell, the entire agency is just a black hole for wasting tax dollars, likely a graft to help ex-bank employees collect Federal paychecks and pensions while doing nothing and claiming to be working on "reform."
(I might contact the CFPB these days, but I think this incident was before they existed.)