My mom has endorsed me for literally every tech under the sun without knowing what any of it means.

I've been endorsed by very close friends, who absolutely know what the endorsements are for, for things that I don't actually have any experience in. There's no way they could have been doing the endorsement intentionally.

If they are "very close friends" why dont you just ask them if it was intentional?

Because initiating a conversation with a friend about LinkedIn is more respect and mindshare than this service deserves.

I think endorsements mean two things usually:

1.) Your good at gaming the system. In college, it wasn't unusual to see entire classes sit down, connect, and endorse for everything you had "skills" added for. Bam, hundred of endorsements.

2.) Your connected with people who are a combo of being a bit clueless and want to be nice. It prompts you to endorse people all the time. Like my sibling comment's anecdote, you often get endorsed for random things from random people who have no clue what the skill is, but want to be nice.

Regarding 1, it also want uncommon to hear advisers in my college giving students advice to the effect of, "You remember that 'Hello World!' code you wrote on MIPS? Now you can put x86 assembly language programming on your resume!" I just ignore lists of skills regardless of location.