Does backlinking still help draw traffic?

These days I have been hearing that backlinking can still be very beneficial to one's site ranking better. I used to do a lot of backlink work for the sites I made in the past. It helped draw traffic to my sites and also helped my rank increase within Google and other search engines.

But, does it work like it used to? Is it worth doing backlinking these days?

I heard it still does matter. I'm a bit new to this, but back when I ran a forum I would use backlinks a lot to try and help push my site to the front page. It took me a while, but my fan blog ended up showing up in the top of results, so I was super happy about that.