First off it depends what you mean by cold.It was basically landed on that for it to really be 'cold', you're basically talking about going up to random people indiscriminately, without and real reason to talk to them, no eye contact, body language, or any reason even on an implicit intuitive level for there to be chemistry or receptivity.

Bearing the above in mind, saying you'll do a lot better if you're going up to people with a vague basis of context or with some chemistry that's already clear, really is kind of self evident.

A personal aside, not speaking for anyone else, but there's way too much emphasis on approaching in general. While you do need to go up to people to talk to them, the community places this weird overemphasis on the very start with little attention to where to go from there. As a result you get people flitting around doing like 20 1 minute interactions where you'd be far better off doing a handful of longer, deeper ones.

I don't think there's anything wrong with doing lots of cold approaches. If you're starting off it can help built a little momentum and self confidence. It sets a low, achievable bar for success and can be exciting if you aren't used to it. Having said that though, if your goal is to actually get laid rather than to get mad PUA lair approach props, you might want to rethink how you go about things. I've done plenty of nights randomly cold approaching 20+ groups of people, and it typically doesn't get you far, whereas being patient and doing 3-5 longer sets a night that make sense to do generally works way better for actually getting laid.

Then again, this is all assuming you were actually asking what people meant, rather than just posting to complain as per.