I do get random spam on Matrix/Element, a couple of times a month. I am in some big public channels though, which may make me a lower hanging target to find my matrix ID to send spam to

Yet…

But seriously, we all know spam and abuse from bad actors is a huge problem for any sort or platform. Email, phone calls, physical mail. Sometimes people will put fliers on your car window to spam it.

Same with VPS providers. Even my router gets random pings and port scans. Forums have to fight bots. It goes on.

I have even gotten iMessage spam, which can easily be reported.

It comes in waves and goes away.

I get spam on Matrix. And Matrix is hardly used so these are just people trolling rather than having some kind of organized entity behind it. As far as I know there is really no anti spam measures on the network.

The number of people using Matrix/Element is so small and relatively sophisticated that it probably has a super low expected value for spammers.

Not true for iMessage at all...

Matrix userbase is much larger than IRC. In my experience IRC spam is still worse, but matrix spam will grow more common as the platform grows. But matrix.org devs are aware and have some plans for spam. Distributed/federated reputation...