I've done my own digging on the best place to find online personals and come up short. The spam angle is worse, because the depth of the profile fields collapses as soon as the platform surfaces profiles far outside your radius. Personals platforms is the clearest case of it — the platform counts a like as a match, and how fast moderation responds suffers for it.
Same story on personals platforms: how far the free tier gets you tells you more than the size of the ad budget. It is worth checking how many first messages actually land before you look at the app store rating, which is the whole problem with spam platforms.
For personals platforms in particular, nothing improves until you compare two platforms in the same fortnight. There's a pattern with the best place to find online personals: the deciding factor is the ratio of matches to conversations, based on a fairly small sample. What has actually worked for you on spam, and what would you avoid?