Opinions on recruiters? Who has gotten a great job from a recruiter that reached out to them? Is it true that they tend to fill jobs that are hard to fill?

I have had only two good experiences with recruiters, both where trying to fill good positions and knew what they were talking about.

All other recruiters always DM me on linked in for the wrong stuff, fucking stupid assholes.

If you don't have anything real good to show recruiters can help you as long as they don't have commission breath, you can tell these pretty quick if they don't bother to find out anything about you and keep an email generic. As you get more to your name it gets alot harder to find a decent recruiter cause the vultures smell easy money and piss people off like me and alexdelarge where we tell all of them to go fuck themselves and jump of a cliff with an anvil with a spike on top of it tied to them

I've never had a good experience with a recruiter. Also, if you ever get some variation of this

"If you think you’re a good match, send me your latest resume. I’d like to learn more about your recent experience. "

in an email it's a dead giveaway that they haven't even glanced at your resume or profile. You popped up in a search and got added to a mass email list.

Recruiters the last bastion of illiteracy. In my experience recruiters working directly for company that does the hiring are ok-ish, but all outsourced hr/recruiting is pit of incompetence, best to stay away. They can't or won't read, they lie to candidates and lie to employers, can't tell JavaScript from Java, ask for 10 year experience in frameworks existing since half year, send offers for senior jobs to juniors and junior jobs to seniors and so on.