Hiring is the topic where people are most eager to assert what's important or useless, normal or weird.

And they contradict each other, constantly. This is what the difference in culture between companies is.

We can't even globally define what a resume/CV is.

yeah the cookie-cutter cover letters are useless, but i've hired people who write: "i love you are working in machine vision, i've worked with x,y and z tech to build _. I could augment your efforts in these fields...".

Call it what you will a cover message or note perhaps.

Now if you want a job outside of FAANGM (bigtech), a well written cover letter will make you the shoe-in candidate.

YMMV

I’ve literally never had to write a cover letter in my 6+ year career in tech outside of FAANGM. Complete waste of time imho.

I hire and pay top of market and I definitely look at cover letters, at least scan them (some are huge tells that they don’t even know what we do, so it weeds out the candidate), and often they’re the thing that differentiates the various candidates who have similar backgrounds. I’ve also hired lots of people without cover letters. I don’t think spending a few minutes writing a paragraph like another poster stated above is a waste of time.

How are you sure you're paying top of market?

And i'm explaining from my 22 year career, my best positions came with a cover letter

HR strip cover letters before they get to the engineers where I work.