Meta tags have the right to life?

For quite a long time, I have been creating all kinds of websites: large and small, simple and complex, bad and good ... In almost every website I create so-called meta-tags inside HEAD . Habit, you know.



More and more I am convinced that systems index the result, based on the content of the pages, sometimes not very beneficial to the creator.



I do not consider myself an expert in SEO (I'm more an expert on code semantics and design), but I would like to ask the habrhabr-community: are meta tags useful at all? (if you take into account only those that can affect search indexing)

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After all, meta-tags do not guarantee TOP ranking in search engines and their most significant opportunity - the webmaster can forcibly “advise” search engines for which category, industry, etc. carry this or that page of your resource, which is useless at the moment (popular search engines do not take this into account).



I would appreciate your thoughts!