they help w/ visibility, promo and putting on local/regional/national events. if you're a newbie looking to get into it, you either search "local crossfit" or just go to crossfit.com and only affiliated gyms can use the name CrossFit. so if you don't want to pay the licensing you're pretty assed out as far as being in the community

from browsing r/crossfit the big issue seems to be how to keep the community together and on the same page if they cant use the CrossFit name as catch-all. a lot of gyms are rebranding to something like Domination CF instead of Domination CrossFit since the CF isnt trademarked

edit: the other big worry seems to be that if there's no one unifying body, then there are no signature events or standards. so it'll be more difficult to get all the top athletes on 1 stage together.