That theory was always bunk. People just can't comprehend, that the average spammer really is that bad. So that theory was created to make sense of that.
Because of my work I investigated a lot of spam, and I discovered real life identities of senders in many cases (because of horrible or no exostent opsec). Most of them were either underage, lived in third world countries, or both.
Scams got sophisticated a while ago where they would exactly replicate things like password reset emails and such including a whole fake replica website that looks identical to the real one.
I saw someone fall for one recently where a scammer had created a fake announcement from an email sending company stating they were adding political messages to the bottom of your sent emails, and to log in to opt out. The look and feel of the email was pretty much perfect.
The sophistication of scam emails these days is a big part of the switch to Passkeys, just physically making it impossible to give your credentials to the scammer site.
it doesn't help that all these companies' legitimate emails contain suspicious-looking links in the first place. the link tracking/shortening that's built into these services isn't doing them any favors for their actually important emails
Remember that a large portion of the "real scam" is selling scamming techniques and systems to wanna-be scammers, some who never figure out how to replace the "insert viagra link here" text.
Phishing too. At one point in my job I was involved with taking down phishing sites, and we would sometimes get a copy of the Phish kit code from the site owner. These were basically extremely poorly written PHP scripts that people would buy from a scam-enabler and deploy to some website. The sophistication was the lowest possible level at each step. But even if you find the perpetrator bragging about it on Facebook, they're in Nigeria (for example) and the local government doesn't care at all.
The new trend is that the legitimate corporations sending you spam regardless of your communication settings, or even after unsubscribing for the 10th time.
Yes, I'm looking at you Teal HQ, you're spamming us even 3 months after deleting our accounts.
Because of my work I investigated a lot of spam, and I discovered real life identities of senders in many cases (because of horrible or no exostent opsec). Most of them were either underage, lived in third world countries, or both.