Bottom line 18-30% of job postings are “ghost jobs” so obviously putting in work for the wrong job is bad. Then yeah as you mentioned, most applications are going to be reviewed by some form of robot… then if you are lucky then an HR person who knows nothing about the actual work in the environment will look over it, check boxes to see if the right key words they are supposed to look for are there. Bottom line it’s like dating and most other parts of life. No matter what you’ll miss every job you don’t apply for, and 99.99% of the ones you do.