You're not missing anything, you're seeing two different pressures and assuming they're the same one.
The settlement's mechanical change was removing buyer-agent compensation offers from the MLS. That hit the buyer side's payment pathway directly. The seller's fee to their own listing agent stayed negotiable exactly as it always was, and sellers in most markets have kept covering the buyer-agent fee anyway, handled outside the MLS, because a listing that makes buyers fund their own agent risks losing to the one that doesn't. Combined commissions have stayed roughly flat through the period. That's the sense in which the listing role came through comparatively intact.
Price pressure on listing fees is older and separate. Discount and flat-fee listing models have been attacking that fee for twenty-plus years, because the listing side is the side where the seller writes the check and can therefore shop it. That existed before the settlement and it'll keep existing. It's a margin problem, not a structural one.
From a standing start, the difference that matters to you is acquisition cost. Buyer clients are comparatively easy to get and now harder to get paid by, since you need a signed representation agreement with your fee stated before you tour anything. Seller clients are hard to get and the fee is more durable once you have them. So the listing side is a slower build with a better back end, and the first two years are the part that kills people.
What I'd watch in your market rather than in general: how many active listing agents per closed sale. Agent oversupply is the long-run pressure on the whole profession, and it presses hardest wherever the fee is already being shopped.
