One reason why out there is so few followers is a non-discourse user must know what to follow. The system isn’t now for easy social media type following, but sharing content from a forum to Fediverse and hoping that someone there is sharing (and even then a mastodon/what ever user can’t follow any discourse actor).
You know amount of followers but you don’t have any idea how many is seeing posts there. But sure, meta is kind of an edge case, because admins propably are here and ordinary users aren’t interested in technical sides of Discourse. So from that point of view I understand that decision.