There's been a spate of reports floating around the various LinkedIn communities about the efficacy of hashtags within the application, whether you even bother to create posts with them in the first place on the platform anymore.

As you'll remember, for years LinkedIn didn't support hashtags at all, but then in 2018 they not only brought the hashtag discoverability back but started forcing the usage of hashtags as an attempt to get more users doing that manually.

The thinking here is that with more refined content segmentation, LinkedIn can then better do a job of showing more relevant content to users. However, the passage of time and improvement in algorithms has actually managed to dilute the more general use of hashtags, as social platform systems have improved to be able to absorb the full context in any given post-with not just what's visually posted but also by the user's history and all the keywords used.

In other words, it becomes less relevant because most of the time, the mentions and indicators involved in the post anyway serve to provide relevance for the system to show your post to the most interested audiences.
In theory, that would mean LinkedIn didn't actually need someone to add in that repeated hashtag above, because the system could pick up on the "Meta" mention within the text.

But is that right?

I asked LinkedIn, and they kind of answered:

"Using hashtags can be an effective tool for viewers to easily know what a post is about and find other related posts. But for them to be as effective, it's essential to utilize hashtags that are closely related to the topic being posted. Apart from using hashtags, we also investigate conversational topics and keywords intended to help surface relevant information for professionals looking to advance in their careers."

So, LinkedIn is saying you should just use relevant hashtags if you want to be effective, but how do you know? Does this mean, when you are required to input the keyword/s in the post, you do not need to add the hashtag?

However, 

"When searching for conversations on a specific topic you can use topics or hashtags.".

So, it appears that LinkedIn no longer relies as much on hashtags to maximize discovery, but you need to be cautious of keywords in your headline post and think about how you might tap into the right conversation streams based on your target topics.

How do you do that?

By following popular pages and people, you can gather a better sense of popular and relevant hashtags to your business niche. The app also allows you to search for hashtags.
I'm assuming AI is a trend more now than it was three years ago; however, this gives you some additional context around the more common discussion trends in the app.

So do you have to use hashtags on LinkedIn? At least in the app I'd say hashtags are less important. There was even a LinkedIn expert who stated that, as has been said by Richard van der Blom, that hashtags arent even helping increase post reach in the app like they used to.

As study by van der Blom indicates, actually, the use of 3-10 hashtags in your LinkedIn posts was providing you with a bit of reach gain over the last couple of years. Now, however, not at all.

Which seems to suggest that LinkedIn is gradually de-emphasizing them as a discovery tool, part of its broader focus on topical relevance rather than reach maximization.

According to LinkedIn:

If you post something saying "I got a new job, and people like it, that doesn't mean the entire networks they like it on will see it in their feeds since probably isn't as relevant to their connections as it is to them.". However, if someone shares a post outlining advice on how to tackle a workplace challenge, it could be seen both by your network and by people outside of your network who may find it helpful to their career growth.".

. The thing that is often emphasized regarding LinkedIn is that its system "is not designed for virality", so hashtags are not necessarily supposed to work the way they do on other apps.

That may well be part of the reason LinkedIn is de-emphasizing them: don't want people to have a way of gaming the system, but the bottom line is that if you're on LinkedIn, you probably aren't nearly as worried about using hashtags as you might have been previously, depending on the context.