Most platforms won’t let you do certain things unless you have a minimum follower threshold. Things such as live streaming, monetizing posts, etc. Artists looking to get record labels these days often have minimum social media follower count requirements too (from the labels). In the end it’s all about marketing and monetizing. They play to the algos, or outright buy fake followers, to build a sufficiently large platform to monetize. It’s fake and inauthentic, and it’s a means to an end that turns their followers into a customer base. 

 These influencoors just need follow bots to make them feel better.
It's all about quantity, not quality, amirite? 

 It SHOULD be about quality, and if they use Nostr then it is possible to make it about quality instead of quantity. But for people using centralized algo-driven social media, then unfortunately they have no choice but to gain the minimum follower/view count before they’re even allowed to monetize their content. And in order to gain followers, they have to be seen and that requires appeasing the algos, which ultimately service the advertisers and other corporate interests of the company running the network.  

 It's such a relatively recent and stupid incentive structure, which ends up creating some real monsters like the YouToob thumbnail faces.

It also pulls the ladder up from genuinely good content creators who don't have the tools that established ones do.

Ultimately they are all taking a big risk by monetizing on these platforms, because they can get rugged with a simple rule change at any moment.