[openknot]

Instagram can have useful business purposes. Some personal trainers/consultants/very small businesses only have an Instagram account, and seem to be doing well. Canada's public broadcaster published an article about this a while back, and the consequences when such business owners were locked out of their account due to an outage: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/facebook-instagram-outage-b...

Otherwise, in certain social groups (especially young adults), Instagram is the main way to stay to stay in touch with friends, even just for the messaging app. So, not having an account means missing out on significant social connection for some (e.g. if it's the platform where the group chats are hosted).

It really depends on your friend group, though; for many people, their social groups just aren't on Instagram or social media very much or at all, so it's easier to quit because there's nothing to miss out on (so for these people, the verification would hardly be worth it).