Disavow or not?

For those who have used the disavow links option as a preventive meas.

[dolcevita]

I'm interested in hearing about other people's experiences with disavow links.
I'm well aware that Google says they don't consider which domain was targeted by negative SEO and that they only look at the domains that are reported, but I have doubts about the transparency of this process.

I wonder whether Google might use your attempt to disavow spam links against your own domain, or if you might be penalized in some way because of it.

I’ve read, for instance, that 'The search engine may then think that all the backlinks you build are bad links. This makes it harder for you to improve your backlink profile in the future.'
The benefits of disavowing backlinks are uncertain, poorly documented, and very difficult to test.

That's why I’m looking for experiences from others who have used the disavow tool strictly as a preventive measure and what their outcomes were.

Thanks

[Kendo]

I have disavowed links with no obvious improvement to ranking.

Finding links to disavow can be suss. I have tried a few trial offers from SEO pundits only to find that the lists that they provide are mostly faked. 90% of the links reported by the last one did not exist and of the remaining links, they were legitimate backlinks on reputable sites.

How I did find links to disavow was by using Bing search which delves much deeper than most. I also found links for takedown notices.

The fact that Google might downgrade the relevance of any site that has your backlinks should not affect your site because you have no control over who reviews your products and services... one would think. But evil is everywhere and so is stupidity.

[delorean]

after 4 years, I removed my disavow file and see no changes. so do not bother.

[tangor]

Didn't g deprecate disavow a half dozen years ago? Just checking my memory (getting long in the tooth).

Never used it. Never saw a need for it. Never heard any success stories one way or the other.

Mostly seemed like a wast of MY time to g's job at my time and expense...

YMMV

[not2easy]

I've never disavowed a link myself. The tool was originally made available for those who had paid for links and didn't want G to penalize them for paid links. It gave them a way to limit damage they had caused by using paid links. That was a long time ago. I know that the tool still exists, but can't see any reason to use it.

As for unwanted, bogus spammy links, Google seems to take care of those on their own. The first time I ever saw those kind of links in GSC, I did a whois lookup on the domain they were listing links from and the domain had been shut down, not available for purchase. I was not about to disavow any of those links. I didn't have anything to do with them and they went away.