I kinda agree with you. Some content that feels like low effort to me gets upvoted to the trending page, while other high quality content get buried into oblivion. However, I believe that people paying for upvote bots won't find long term success, at least the majority of them as their followers will only be artificial ones at best as you've pointed out already.

No matter where you go, every social platform will have people greedy for short term attention, trying to use it to accumulate wealth and long term stability. While it sounds reasonable to have a shot at gaining a lot of genuine followers by being shown on the trending page, I believe it is far more sustainable to slowly increase your following by regularly posting content, no matter whether it's low effort or not. There is even an audience for low effort content after all.