I spent 3 hours deleting 800 emails one by one and it changed nothing

Everyone in this group keeps saying you have to touch each email and sort it by hand, but that advice cost me a Saturday. I sat at my kitchen table in Boise with a mug of coffee and moved 800 messages from my inbox into folders, one click at a time, for 3 hours. My unsubscribes did nothing either, because 14 stores kept mailing me after I hit that button. What fixed it was a filter rule that swept 6,000 old emails into one archive folder in about 90 seconds. I still get nervous opening my inbox, but at least the number starts at zero now. Am I the only one who thinks the slow careful method is just busywork for people with more patience than me? If you found a faster way to clear a giant backlog, what did it look like?