Well, many people are busy, but yeah it should usually work. ResearchGate makes this even easier, because you can directly see who is requesting a paper and sometimes as an author you’ve got the paywalled paper already uploaded in researchgate.

I remember my first week using research gate and spamming the request paper button.

Many post their articles on Researchgate. I find requesting the article there has a higher success rate and it’s just a click of a button.