"We simply replace demand with dollars."
Exactly. So we will alternatively just have other representation of 'demand' replacing the monetary system. The monetary system helps quantify demand, which beyond basic needs and community needs are much harder to quantify. Who can objectively quantify and prioritize one person's desire for fancy cooking equipment, compared to another person's desire of some gym equipment for their personal use? Money is one of the most efficient ways to quantify such demand.
Beyond our basic needs (some/most of which only exist in artificial scarcity thanks to the wastefulness of capitalism), humans do have the aforementioned conflicting 'desires' which are not necessary for survival but improves their life and requires time, space, and material resources to satisfy and produce. Such distribution cannot just be satisfied only through 'bringing in more workers', but also requires prioritizing where to spend our limited human/material/space/time/etc resources at. There's only so many workers and so much time in the world, but there is infinite demand. We cannot satisfy all these arbitrary demands, so we could only try to satisfy as many demands as possible.
We could have majority voices, consensus, local communities, representatives, and other forms of bureaucracy controlling supplies.... A monetary system w/ a proper redistribution mechanism to prevent abuse is a mechanism that could help and ease the distribution of resources by assigning specific values to them, without the need of complicated bureaucracy. Everyone having a certain money/resources to trade in have a direct voice on what they want. They could increase the weight of the demand by increasing the price of products in relation to the cost of the supply. Suppliers could then directly assist in satisfying demands with higher weight of demand, even if they are geographically distanced and does not know their customers.
I think life is about balancing our self-autonomy and ensuring that everyone's basic needs are met when we obviously have the resources to at least satisfies everyone's basic needs. Bureaucracy might be necessary at times, but there's also a benefit in having the ability to directly vote through money/resources/trade goods/etc.