I’m sure it used to, and I’m sure I observed it being a big headache for many here on Meta.
I recall having to switch any topic where I was mentioned back to ‘normal’ or ‘tracking’ manually, which was very tedious!!
But I’m a bit uncertain if I am hallucinating, or the functionality changed:
Certainly I have been doing things wrong recently as I expected it to bump people up to watching. Explains a lot of flat engagement!!!