Please understand that this is spam. Spam that passes both automated filters, and the eye of an intelligent, skeptical human. A scraper found an email in a post, and is playing a numbers game looking for a sucker.

>I mean, just answer their question and move on with your life

What's 5 minutes multiplied by hundreds of emails? We're talking about a human vs a sea of infinite text generators here.

>What have you really lost?

The ability to see if the person on the other side of the communication is trying, or a person at all. There is no way to distinguish a friendly thoughtful email from a stranger from a robot trying to take your money until you've wasted substantial time on them. That makes all communication with new contacts risky... perhaps prohibitively so.