Are personas actually useful?

I've read a lot about personas and have created personas as part of my job, but I am wholly unconvinced about their usefulness. My feeling is that they allow too much room for interpretation, assumption and bias and they tend to lack diversity.

Everything I have researched claims the purpose of them is to evoke empathy and to define goals, needs and pain-points. The latter three are actionable insight, but can a persona actually help someone overcome personal biases overcome in order to feel empathy for a certain person/persona? My gut tells me, no, that people will still be driven by their personal prejudices and assumptions no matter what the persona is. And that personas might, in fact, make more room for their biases in spite of the best intentions.

Are there better ways to achieve what personas were invented to achieve? Or am I misunderstanding their purpose and/or use?