Quick Check on Reliability of Email Open Rate Tracking Metrics and Industry Issues

Do we actually rely on open rate as a metric today (in GMass, Instantly, or wherever we track outreach)?

Has anyone noticed our current open rates looking unusually high or inflated? (This is often a sign of Apple's Mail Privacy Protection or Gmail pre-loading images, which fakes "opens" that never really happened — it's a known industry issue, not specific to us.)