I stopped paying any attention to the trending page. I often find people through different curation projects that help them get exposed. In the way I waste less time on posts I would not care about and more on some good reading(happy I found your blog, for example).
My feed is the only place I look for new followers, since those I follow usually either resteem other good authors or are just really good themselves.
But I gotta admit even before the "promotion" madness went loose, they weren't that much of a use anyways. I feel like it has never been working, even without the bots it was just instead the opinion of the whales that got the upvotes.
some people hold on to a MAGA type idea of..
Make the trending page great again... I ask... When was it great? When?
Exactly my point! They always seems to have been little to no use. I am not sure from what time people have been thinking otherwise but the year I have been here it was not. We still need to find some balance in all of this.