The internet used to be a suspicious, sarcastic, and rather disbelieving crowd, but that has changed for newer generations. I do thing there are many people for whom this is news. There 's just too much fluff feel-good marketing content going around that one forgets the motives behind it. Old style blogs and comments made it obvious that there were tons of spam, nowadays it has gone covert because major distribution platforms remove obvious spam.

Unfortunately this means that if you want to promote your side project, there's just no way, most topical subreddits will flag u as spam, and you are left with niches like r/sideproject. Or you do this kind of social media/content marketing