Only a few people care if it's still around, and they're the ones who profit from it.  In some cases they profit enormously.  The average person doesn't know about central banks and doesn't care to know.  To the ones at the top of the political – economic heap, this is how they want it.

A central bank such as the Fed comes about through political favors — favors to big bankers and to politicians intent on buying votes and making war.  Where you find a country with a central bank, you have laws establishing it. A central bank is not a voluntary agreement among bankers.  In practice, it is a sophisticated counterfeiting racket backed by the monopoly force of government.  Remember, there would be no Fed without the Federal Reserve Act.

Central banks are often described as inflation fighters.  As monopoly producers of money, they are instead the sole source of inflation.  The Fed's definition of inflation as "the rate at which the price of goods and services increases over time," serves as a cover for their crime of targeting (price) inflation at two percent.  It's policy is to ensure the dollar buys less over time since only the naive believe low prices are good.  As a monetary thief, the Fed has been a huge success.

Central banks such as the Fed are said to be responsible for making capitalism work.  By making honest price discovery impossible and raging war against savers, they are in fact anti-capitalistic.  If you want to kill capitalism and replace it with cronyism and instability turn the market over to central bankers.  President Woodrow Wilson did, in late 1913.  As Keynes expressed it:

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. . . As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Almost every textbook that discusses the history of the the Federal Reserve will say it came about as a solution to the various Panics of the 19th century and the Panic of 1907.  What the textbooks don't discuss is why the Panics came about: the common practice of fractional reserve banking.  In simplest terms fractional reserve banking consists of a bank giving two people equal claim to the same monetary unit at the same time.  How's that for honesty?  It's standard operating procedure.  With the exception of Austrian School economists, it is noncontroversial.

As central banks were called on to play a major role in funding World War I, European belligerents suspended payment in gold — in other words, they outlawed inflation-resistant money.   Doing so prolonged the war and resulted in shocking casualty figures.