Should I disavow my backlinks? I have been doing a lot of readings, some people claim google is smart enough to ignore spammy links, while others claim otherwise. I am still on the fence.

The October spam update hit my site hard and since then I have been in damage control trying to figure things out.

My website is about two years old, and I wrote all the content myself. In my opinion, I consider it to be genuinely helpful.

A little background.
My site previously got a decent amount of traffic from search (About 6000 clicks per month), but it got 10x more traffic from google discover. Google use to love promoting my articles on Discover and while it was always a roller coaster ride, the number of views surged and the site was healthy. Among a mountain of spam, there was a lot of positive feedback in the comment section. All seemed good.

Then the October spam update hit, and over a couple of days, my clicks plummeted, (although discover traffic was still healthy which hid the decline). I decided to ignore it, I went away for cycling tour, hoping the problem will fix itself. During that time I did not publish any new content. During that time, traffic from discover also dropped away. (Okay, that is not unusual, Discover traffic is always a roller coaster).

Anyway. My search traffic is now dead. Averaging around 30 clicks per day down from 300.

Since getting back, I published several new articles and went through several hundred old articles updating, improving, and heavily pruning old affiliate links. My old articles were quite affiliate-heavy, my new ones from about 6 months ago have no affiliate links. I also told my ad manager, to show fewer ads.

So, I seem to be writing a novel. I will get to the point.

Backlinks.

Other than a couple of links in social media/forum profiles, I have never built any backlinks.

All my backlinks are organic. I barely even look at them until this update, and most of them are not pretty, 97% seem to be leading to spam sites. According to GSC, my website has 612links, out of all of these maybe 21 are not spam (Exceptions being 15 comments from Reddit, a few from private relevant forums, a few links from other blogs, and one link from Wikipedia).

Any advice? Is it worthwhile disavowing the majority of the spammy backlinks?
Should I just ride it out?