is selling on instagram still worth the effort?

the thing that quietly kills it for small shops is "dm for price". most people don't dm for price, they scroll on. put the price in the caption or on the product tag and say how they pay. and keep a proper shop somewhere else - your own site, etsy, whatever - so instagram is the shop window and not the till.

For a local account, yes, but probably not in the way those articles mean it. Every sale I have watched come out of it happened in the DMs or in replies - somebody sees a reel, messages asking whether you have it in stock, you answer within the hour. That is the entire funnel. Which means follower count matters far less than whether anyone is answering the inbox. Before you plan around product tagging or in-app checkout, check what is actually available for your account type and country, because it varies and it has changed more than once.