Follower count is good for Internet dick measuring and influencers setting rates for shill posts, and not much else.

Unfortunately on a permissionless network there will always be somewhere to get these stats, because there is demand.

I do agree it should be removed from clients, along with the concept of a single "people I follow" list. Multiple lists allowing for organization would be 💯 better. As the size of a single list grows it becomes useless. People lists are in a sad state though, with missing support and interoperability issues everywhere. It's something I hope to see improvements on.

Imagine the names of lists as "tags", and seeing a word cloud of how people you trust had another person tagged. That would be much more useful than # of followers.