I think this is a bit of short-term thinking. How much are these followers worth if they don't like the topics you write about? They won't comment, they won't upvote. And on the other side, you now follow many people who write about a lot of subjects that you might not care about at all. So now your Home feed is filled with articles you don't find interesting. The people you follow for their content get lost inside this feed, so you risk missing interesting articles and they don't get the upvotes you think they deserve.

I don't think these kind of initiatives are a smart move in the long run, but if a lot of followers is your only aim, then I'm happy for the people in this train.