Not having follows is one major reason why I get muted so much and have surprisingly few follows. There are scripts that auto-mute and/or auto-unfollow anyone without follows. It's also a major reason why people refuse to follow me, as they only do the follow-back thing.

My npubs have lots of mutes (also just because I'm such a horrible person and I make people feel unsafe 🙄), which counts negatively toward WoT, and some of the algos deduct points for not having follows, on principle, as we're seen as "refusing to WoT with others", so we get actively penalized.