Asking earnestly: is ArXiv a valuable resource? I used it few years back when finishing my (late) Master's, but also saw a lot of crap published there (primarily for promotion/visa purposes) so it kind of took the shine out of the service for me.

A free-to-read PDF host site is valuable enough. Most academic publishers have a pay wall.

The preprint papers on arXiv are like 99% the same as the published versions, except they're free instead of locked behind a multi-thousand dollar/year paywall.

It’s good for getting free access to preprints which are often close enough to the paywalled real papers in journals. If I find a paper I want (or more realistically, if ChatGPT finds a paper it wants for me), but it’s behind a paywall, odds are the authors put a preprint on arXiv.

Some researchers and journals publish peer-reviewed work on arxiv; it serves as a stable archive that won't be plagued by link rot or paywalls.

Either you setup feeds for the specific topics/subjects you care about, scan what you come across once a week, or you use it to get access to papers that are usually behind some paywall. I don't think the intention nor the value comes from just haphazardously reading through everything in some section.

It's not peer-reviewed and supposed to free and accessible from both sides so the results kind of makes sense.