This is an overly cynical take. It’s not either/or. Meeting more people just means being exposed to more first hand information in both directions. It gives more surface area for serendipity to strike.

It’s nice to imagine that all information about the job market would be available online for convenient index and search, but that’s just not the case. When it comes to understanding the culture in a company, theres no substitute for talking to someone on the inside. Similarly when you are a hiring manager, not every great candidate is going to apply or even have a LinkedIn profile.

Now, I tend to agree that most things explicitly labeled “networking” feel tiresome and a bit forced, but there’s nothing about meeting people that means bypassing objective evaluation for hiring.

Sure if I meet an executive at a golf course and after a few drinks at the clubhouse, he decides I should get a job he just opened, that's nepotism. But I've been an utter outsider in every industry I've come across, and did not have any family or social connections in any relevant professional or academic circle. If I'm at a conference and jibe with someone in between panels over a common professional perspective, and they later forward me a job opening to apply to within their organization, it's a pretty big stretch to call that nepotism. It's not like you just get dropped in that job without proving your merit. It seems to me that nepotism happens within or through relationships or social/class structures that already exist-- not among people who develop professional relationships outside of their workplaces. It's a pretty huge stretch to say that conferences or any other kind of bona fide career networking facilitates nepotism more than they facilitate genuine professional relationships.