This has been bugging me for weeks, so: fling apps still a thing. The fling angle is worse, because the platform counts a like as a match, and the time it takes to get a first reply suffers for it. The fling case is instructive — what decides it is the churn on new sign-ups, not the marketing copy.
If fling is your priority, the honest advice is to check what the free tier gates before investing time, going by the last year or so. Fling bots is where I would start, since it is worth checking how quickly the inbox fills before you look at the length of the feature list.
The reply rate is the number worth watching, not the size of the ad budget, which is the whole problem with fling bots. What finally clicked for me about fling apps still a thing was that the proportion of dormant accounts is worth more than the size of the ad budget. Tell me where the fling apps reasoning above falls down.