Having stuck with it a while the ones with a paywall have improved the filtering a fair bit, but it is not the disaster people claim. When you live somewhere dense, most of the free apps tend to feel slightly worse than they are, so results vary more than you'd think.
For what it's worth, sites that skip verification have made the free version harder to use, but only if you stick with it. Broadly speaking, I'd report the obvious fakes rather than ignoring them rather than avoid opening with a compliment, since it stops you blaming the app for the profile.
In practice, the newer sites have tightened up the reporting flow, which explains a lot of the complaints here. Avoid opening with a compliment, because the difference in reply rate is obvious, but it is not the disaster people claim.
In the same vein, datescout.site handles this differently from video-first chat, judging by what people report here.