I had about 1000 connections and found my linkedin homepage completely useless as it wasn't showing me anything about the people I care about (mostly uni friends, colleagues).

I went through and whittled the list down to about 150 people I would either consider a friend or.close colleague.

My homepage is still useless as linkedin shows me random trending posts, so that effort was a complete waste of time.

It hadn't occured to me that recruiters would see less than n connections as a negative trait. I'd expect the opposite, someone with 1k connections (e.g) seems like someone who connects regardless.