Regarding newsletters, the majority of those are opt-out (as opposed to opt-in) and the opt-out process is intentionally convoluted ("untick this checkbox if you would prefer not to subscribe to our newsletter"), so as far as I'm concerned it's indeed spam.
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/privacy-policy/
> We'll ask you for your email address so you can use it to sign into freeCodeCamp, and so we can send you announcements and helpful programming-related links.
Essentially, this is an "opt-in" process because you are opting to create your account and you agree with the site policies.
Granted, I'm in no way a legal professional and I could be wrong about everything I said here. Corrections are welcome.
A FreeCodeCamp account presumably offers more functionality beyond just the newsletter, and the majority of people would sign up for that functionality and not the newsletter.
Yet, there is no way to opt-out directly, and you have to go through extra steps to do so after the fact.
This is also in breach of the GDPR which mandates that consent for non-essential data processing (marketing communications fall into that) should be opt-in (so pre-ticked checkboxes are already forbidden) and freely given (so there is no penalty for declining, you can’t refuse to open an account for them if they decline consent).
I run a paid service that attempts to deal with exactly this problem - a key feature being to never think twice about giving out an email address.
I recently implemented "one touch" blocking to minimize friction in the process: https://kopi-cloud.atlassian.net/wiki/x/IoCvKg
I voluntarily subscribed some of the Cooper Press weekly newsletters https://cooperpress.com/publications/ They are definitely opt-in, not spam.
I regularly unsubscribe newsletters I didn't opt-in, usually from unknown sources. Not many of them lately and the opt-out usually works. I remember a couple of times I had to send an email with a mention of GDPR in it. It worked.
So "the majority" of newsletters are modern spam, not really.
There is definitely a minority out there like yourself that knows how to manage it and only subscribes to a few select newsletters, for I think for the majority of people, newsletters are a net negative otherwise you wouldn't see people with thousands of unread emails and there wouldn't be so much hype around tools like Hey.