Does an audience's hatred of God justify an abandonment of apologetics?

People make a lot of excuses for neglecting apologetics, and one of the more popular excuses is that the audience involved can't be influenced by apologetics because of their hatred of God. Supposedly, we shouldn't even attempt to persuade them, because of that hatred, because they like their sin too much to be reasoned with, etc. There are a lot of problems with that line of thought.

Non-Christians range across a spectrum, from the most resistant to God to the least resistant (e.g., Cornelius in Acts 10). We're largely ignorant of where people are on that spectrum, and we're even more ignorant of the status of onlookers (people who overhear our conversations with other individuals in the workplace, people who read what we post on the internet, etc.). That includes onlookers we don't even know about.

Saying that only God can change somebody's heart doesn't tell you what means he'll use (e.g., his use of apologetics to convert people in Acts 19:8 and other contexts). Furthermore, you don't know what means he'll use in pre-conversion contexts, including how apologetics could be used to move somebody closer to God, even if that movement doesn't include conversion at that point in time.

And that raises another issue. People have the ability to remember things. It's not as though something like apologetic work has to either get immediate results or get none at all. There can be results that aren't immediate. What's planted at one point can grow at another point. That's why parents and teachers instruct children with an expectation that what they aren't using much or at all at a young age will be more useful to them later in life. Or when a rebellious adolescent sighs or rolls his eyes in response to what his parents say, they say it anyway, hoping that what they've said will get a better reception at a later point in time (whether a later point in the short term or in the long term).

Besides, apologetics isn't just about converting people. It also serves a lot of other purposes (glorifying God, the sanctification of the apologist, increasing the confidence of believers, silencing unbelievers who are spreading misinformation, etc.).

There are occasions when refraining from apologetics is justified. But, generally speaking, the problem in our culture is at the other end of the spectrum, with people not doing apologetic work nearly as often as they should. Most likely, it's often the case that there's a problem with the Christian not being ready to do apologetic work, even though he's using the alleged unpreparedness of the unbeliever as an excuse for not doing the work. The problem is your unpreparedness. You're just using the alleged unpreparedness of the audience as an excuse. Stop using that excuse, get prepared to do the work that needs done, and do it.