Anyone who has worked front-line customer support knows why all the roadblocks are in place; it's a massive firehose of absolute junk 90% of the time.

Yep. My first job out of college was support at a consumer web company. The vast majority of people did not need a PMs attention. Honestly a larger percentage of them needed psychiatric help.

The problem comes when there’s no escalation path for the few cases that actually do need it. Looking at you Google.

I’ve never used LinkedIn support, so couldn’t say whether they would handle something like the OPs issue correctly.

There are always escalation paths, the question is if they're official, or if the front-line support isn't trusted with putting someone on it.

Yep. One job I had was to work on a team to automate the destruction of 99% of all job applications coming from the internet while still nominally being in compliance with EEOC. We figured out a number of ways.

The company actually ONLY hired people directly recommended by employees or trusted business partners. 100% of all unsolicited resumes were ignored and destroyed (yet had a paper trial for legal and EEOC compliance).

that employer is part of the reason job hunting is so miserable

It felt unfair to the employee offering to help. They (probably) have no control over LinkedIn customer support.

It looked like trying to scoring internet points at the expense of the person offering help.