Which is fair, as long as it's concrete, the addressee is actually available and on the clock, and the question can only be answered by that person.

I'm active on a programming language Slack space, what sometimes happens is that people are DMed directly with a generic / open question that dozens of others could also answer.

For which, I am thankful to them. Nothing better then dozens of irrelevant chat messages in larger group chats I am member of that I cant mute, because once in a while there is something important.

You should use threads for that.

I mute them anyway because I won’t see the important message among all the chit-chat notifications, so I cut the middleman.