If by actually help you mean does it ever fix things? No, an OBD reader will never fix a problem, it is just a diagnostic tool, it helps locating a problem without having to essentially do a full body scan by hand, kinda as if you had a leak in a house, and instead of having to inspect every pipe in the house tearing down walls, you just use a tool that tells you “leak found, upstairs shower, hot side valve”, yes you still could have found the leak just by hand if you wanted, but it might have taken days or weeks, and tons of money replacing unnecessary pipes.

Its good you have a shop that did the OBD readout and gave you suggestions for free, most shops around me you’ll be paying hundreds for that, but I agree it still suck regardless that you are down a path that is gonna cost thousands, for what it is worth, if you have an airbag/SRS problem, an OBD reader definitely wouldn’t help as anything SRS is always really expensive, usually not just a case of plug and play parts, even just a broken wire isn’t just a simple soldering job and hardware adaptions very much are vehicle specific and can be timely if calibration is necessary