Are growth hacked users worth anything?

You wouldn't know. Probably not. You can have thousands of users signing up within a week and they never come back. Those people in growthackers are full of shit. They are there to advertise their shitty product and tell their fellow shitty people that their product is not shitty.

The measure is consistent number of people signing up and Active Users.

In the full spectrum of growth hacking, there is also the conversion rate optimization (CRO) and retention rates.

You have mentioned when users signed up through different channels (be it baited, conned, or bought into), these are the various acquisition techniques the company has used.

So how many of these sign-ups get retained are part of the pirate metrics (AARRR) that all growth people are concerned about, and there are other techniques to retain the users. The ultimate way, of course, is to create something that solves a real problem of the users.

Growth hacking is a way to provide distribution for products that solve real needs.