It’s another anecdote - my current employer reached out to me on LinkedIn. Not a commissioned third party recruiter, an internal recruiter.

Someone reaching out to you from a company is a huge leg up over applying directly somewhere: you already know they’re interested.

I’m not sure how they would have found me otherwise. My personal website? Through word of mouth and connections?

It’s only spam when you’re not considering a job change.

My use case for having a Linkedin account is generally keeping track of where people I've worked with in the past are now, and checking out companies/people before I speak to them about something.

TBH I get the recruiter spam that I'm sure most get, but it's easily ignored, and not really that invasive.

I haven’t finished the signup and they started sending spam already. To me linkedin is a curse.