A high enough follower or subscriber count would make sure the algorithm works hard enough to find and show your content to your target or ideal audience.

Wait, what did you just say? Follower count doesn’t matter? It’s like saying money doesn’t matter. Of course it does. Just don’t exclusively chase it even at the expense of everything else. By the way, new followers mean increased engagement, which then will make the algorithm push your content to the people who really fall under the category of your 1000 true fans. You do not celebrate the new followers despite this being useless. You do so because this is all there is. Let that sink in.

The same could be said about all vanity metrics and your analytics. They mean more engagement which would then lead to the algorithm or system pushing your posts to a greater number of people, so that the people who would really care about you would start following or subscribing to you.