Provided the connections are clear, there's a chance they stick around, yes.
In practice I've already seen accounts using Actfit or whatever completely unaware of all this shit we're doing right now. Limiting exposure to everything else. Same with Splinterlands players. Unaware of the other Hive products.
Missed opportunities. Hive.io site helped improve things but with thousands more, all the consumer really sees are thousands of logos that could mean anything.
Thousands of communities; that's millions of potential consumers. They all need a bit of HP and it's wise to find ways to encourage them to have a bit more. I cringe when I hear folks talk about stripping the base layer because you're throwing one the best opportunities to decentralize out the door.
And if that panic you mention turns into thousands of tokenized communities that each have a token for this, token for that, token for governance; you've taken the initial reason why the consumer came in the first place away, and turned their experience into something that isn't even remotely close to being, interesting, in general.