Yeah it's been a life saver. It's only been running for a couple of months, I set it up when there was a massive whole-of-fediverse spam wave happening all sharing the same URL. Thousands of spam posts and most of them could be automatically removed before anyone saw them! One down side (and arguably up-side) of the fediverse is that if the home instance of the user doesn't ban them then every other instance has to ban them individually. Automods help to ease this burden, but each instance has to set up an automod and maintain their own rules.
I expect over time we will probably see more lemmy compatible tools to help, since Lemmy is still in the early days.