I read all the answers, and I have a bit of a controversial point to share.
The effect of spamming has actually improved for me over the past few years.
You see, before, Google used to penalize websites for cheap, bad, spammy links. But that created a serious negative SEO problem. A lot of niches were dealing with competitors intentionally building bad links to their sites, so Google eventually had to get better at simply ignoring spammy links.
Now, in my experience, spammy links either work or do nothing, but they don't seem to cause the same kind of penalty they used to.
I use RankerX for this. I mainly use it for short-term projects and target keywords with around 30-200 monthly searches. For those types of projects, I've found this approach can still work.