That's how it is supposed to be for me as well, but unfortunately that's not how it is. I only use it because my father and grandparents overseas use it. I literally only have 3 contacts in my whatsapp list, I don't use it ever outside of that.

I still get spam accounts adding me on whatsapp about once every couple of weeks, pretending to have accidentally added a wrong phone number, and then trying to bait the receiver into something (usually using phone numbers with SEA country-codes and profile pics of women that were obviously models and are easily reverse image-searchable). Out of boredom, I once decided to entertain that conversation and pretend to be clueless and play along, just to see how the scam unfolds. Inevitably, I got asked about crypto and got shilled some crypto-related scam that person was running.

Tl;dr: I literally don't use whatsapp for anything, have no picture or full name on my profile, and only use it to communicate with 3 of my relatives, and I still get plenty of scammers messaging me from different SEA countries' numbers about once every few weeks. For context: I live in the US and haven't even visited SEA once (yet).