I've used professionals occasionally to access records that I can't access myself (usually because they're not online, and held in a different country where I couldn't easily visit the relevant archives).
I suspect you've been misled by some of the many trees online that claim to go back to ridiculously early dates. If you find a tree online with tens of thousands of people that claims to go back to Adam and Eve or whatever, you can be sure it's a work of fiction. These trees are then copied by well-meaning amateurs with no understanding of genealogy, and the more copies circulate, the more people assume they must be true.
People of royal descent in certain countries where there were good written records may be able to get back a fair way, but the vast majority of people researching their trees are actually descended from perfectly ordinary people, who won't appear in written records until relatively recent times.
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