I was made redundant 6 months before the pandemic by a large telco. During the process I was offered career counselling so the company could tick off the requirement to provide assistance with redeployment. The sum total of their counselling effort was to provide an eLearning module on how to create and optimise a LinkedIn profile.

I bluntly told them that LinkedIn was a contributing factor in my redundancy as it allowed productivity black holes to move from company to company “right-sizing” the workforce and actively engaging with it held the same appeal as sawing my left arm off without the assistance of anaesthesia.

7 months later I was contacted by an entirely different bunch of HR drones begging me to come back to work at the company as the pandemic hitting had revealed how desperately understaffed and brittle it was with little to no ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Explaining to them that I would happily come back for a salary equal to that of the executive in charge of HR with a 5 year contract got me an incredulous response. When I pointed out they wanted me to quit the job I had found (entirely on my own) that paid better, with better hours, less responsibility and more time with my family to return to a job with a company that hired contracted HR goons to fire as many people as possible to goose the share price they acted genuinely befuddled.

TLDR: In my experience LinkedIn is a quasi cult that exists solely to benefit the management class. If it was shutdown today and the top 20% of users by engagement were thrown into a dungeon and never allowed out nothing of value would be lost and the world would actually function better.

Could not agree more. I dumped LinkedIn 15 years ago and never regretted it.