Maybe that changed over the years, I only remember professional recruiters. But even so, this still mostly amounts to noise as to me the majority of companies are just not interesting to work for at all. I usually target 3 to 5 (max) interesting companies / openings which I thoroughly research on beforehand myself. That approach has never failed me so far, keeps me interested and motivated to go through interviewing plus an upper hand during negotiations. YMMV of course, that's just the approach that has consistently worked for me.

Oh yeah there's definitely a lot of noise. I have a niche that is very SEO'd on LinkedIn (Haskell), so that helps. I do just ignore people inquiring about generic software jobs though. But every so often a Haskell company finds me and then I keep in touch.