Not as your first campaign. Performance Max hands Google your budget to spend across all its surfaces with no keyword control, no negative control, and little visibility into where money went — which is exactly the control a new advertiser needs while learning what works.
PMax can perform once you have deep conversion history and proven creative for the algorithm to learn from — it's a scaling tool, not a starting tool. Google's interface will push it hard regardless; that's their revenue optimization, not your lead optimization.
Our default: prove a tightly-controlled Search campaign first. When measured CPL is stable and tracking is bulletproof, then test PMax against it with a bounded budget and judge it on the same numbers.