Why do people think PR and coverage is so important? It's not at all obvious to me that techcrunch has anything to do with who actually succeeds, they really do

Why do people think PR and coverage is so important? It's not at all obvious to me that techcrunch has anything to do with who actually succeeds, they really don't do real coverage of early stage startups- it's just PR Newswire plus trolling authors. Yet so many founders seem to think it's important and even worth hiring a PR firm to get into techcrunch and other similarly thin tech content farm blogs. That techcrunch nofollows all outbound links says enough about how they think about your startup, no matter how cool it may be.