True. I wrote that from the perspective of a sales process trying not to waste time.

As far as risking being annoying, it's an unfortunate reality that you come out way ahead in sales if you talk to a lot of people, even if you make a fraction of them hate you along the way. That's even true when selling to programmers. But it does have externalities as all the sales teams collectively evolve their tactics to keep cutting through.

no, you should set up in person meetings with them, livestreamed on youtube, and jerk them around for awhile, covering them with glitter at the end.

Yeah, "it costs nothing to reach out" when there's a low percentage of recipients who will be interested is exactly how we we got to the current equilibrium of "developers just ignore marketing emails". Individually, it might seem like there's no cost, but collectively they've all made their job a lot harder by making it not worth developers' time to try to sift through the noise and try to find signal.