To have or not to have followers-counter is the kind of design decision that every client need to figure out itself.

There is a non-questionable absolute metric to mesoure the value of a npub: the value you as a free individual arbitrarly assign to it.

There is a surrogated to that, and it is something like a ponderated median of followers-zaps-interactions-andsoon...

There is a non-questionable and cool way to choose what NPUBs show up first as "suggested": it's doing advertising. Who pays is publicized. nostr:npub1xnf02f60r9v0e5kty33a404dm79zr7z2eepyrk5gsq3m7pwvsz2sazlpr5 does something like that in his website promoting and ranking its contributors.