Is anyone else exhausted by "growth hacks" that just mean spamming people?

I don't want to rant here (but I probably will a bit)... 😅

I've been doing product marketing and growth for a while now, and I feel like the whole industry has just defaulted to volume over quality. Almost every growth strategy I see lately is "send more cold emails," "post 5 times a day on LinkedIn," or "find a loop to spam people's inboxes." It's cheaper and more scalable, sure, but it's exhausting.

It feels like we've traded building actual relationships with users for building automated sequences that annoy them.

So, how do you actually drive meaningful growth right now without feeling like a spammer?

The only thing that seems to work for me lately is extreme manual outreach: literally finding 10 people a day who have the exact problem we solve and writing them a personal message. It doesn't scale, but it actually converts.

I know this depends on the product and the audience, but how are you approaching growth right now without falling into the volume trap?