Meta tags have a right to life?

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

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

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

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

I would be grateful for your thoughts!