I definitely recall in the early 2000's it absolutely did lead to spam, and e-mail obfuscation techniques were a real thing that genuinely helped.

But by 2015 or so it didn't matter at all anymore, in my personal experience. It didn't even lead to spam that needed to filtered. Spammers just stopped looking for e-mails that way.

Which makes perfect sense -- most people don't have their e-mail address listed anywhere online in the first place, but you can purchase gigantic lists of e-mail addresses. That either originate from companies that sell their own user lists, or people who hacked the companies' servers.

These days if you want to send spam, trawling the web for e-mails makes zero sense. It's practically the least efficient thing you could do.