Does mass article submission work?

Help anyone?

Does it work at fulfilling what purpose, exactly?

Generating referral-traffic?

Not usually; highly unlikely. More often than not, the sites you're mass-submitting to are of very low-quality, and have far more (rubbish, spun) content than they have the necessary amount of backlinks and domain authority to get it all indexed. They also rarely rank highly in the SERPs, so there's little-to-no traffic flowing around their site that's likely going to result in resource-box link clicks.

Building backlinks?

Yes, you can build backlinks this way (providing your article pages are crawled/indexed by Google, so that the backlinks count!), but typically they'll be of very low-quality and won't count for much.

Generally speaking, sites from which a backlink would be desirable are not sites willing to accept automated submissions - especially not of low-quality content that's clearly spun. The sites you could probably do without the backlinks from, unless you're really desperate, are those who'd welcome your mass-submitted (and potentially spun, barely comprehensible) content with open arms.

My advice: If you're going to be mass-submitting articles to low-quality directories, don't bother to spin them or anything like that. Just submit them as-is. I suspect you'll discover, after a little while, that the benefits of mass-submitting are often so minuscule as to make justifying the time it takes very difficult, indeed.