To answer the actual question in the title, I think the answer is definitely yes. Just one example, here’s a recent article about a rediscovered insect in Australia. It includes:
Mr Slatyer said citizen scientists drove Australia’s fastest-growing biological dataset, contributing roughly 70 per cent of the 180 million records in the Atlas of Living Australia
“I check between 200 and 400 new records a week where the species name is literally not in our list of Australian species … and most of those are coming from citizen scientists,” he said.
Over 7,300 papers have been published that cite at least some iNat data from GBIF.
If you take a look at inaturalist.org/blog or any of our social media channels, you’ll see many examples of how iNat is helping scientists and conservationists.
We met with a decent number of state herpetologists a few years ago. There were concerns with some poaching issues, but most were really just interested in the data, which they can’t really get elsewhere. There are definitely issues with getting US state natural heritage agencies true locations for obscured observations, but as others have said some states are making projects to get this accomplished. We’re also piloting an initiative in California as a way to see how this might work in other US states.