Publishing is, by and large, white, allocishet, and privileged. For marginalized people in particular, finding the right agent for their health, well being, and work is pretty pivotal to their success.

And I have to raise an eyebrow at:

-agents who feel it is inappropriate to vet them
-authors who bitch about new authors trying to protect themselves

Said authors aren't on the hook to respond to the query, but... like. You were new once.

If you resent people asking around about you and you're in a fairly visible position as a gatekeeper, particularly in this case a gatekeeper who used social media to establish their platform, I gotta ask a pretty important question.

What are you afraid folks are gonna find out.

(Also, for a point of reference, when @falconesse and I made our initial list of agents to query, Lauren worked at then-Time Warner. We asked the YA editors who they liked working with to cull our sub list. That was ten years ago. It's TOTALLY STANDARD to poke around.)