Yeah people don't realise that they are bumping his work to recent thread activity a lot. There is no such thing as bad publicity the more people talk about something the more it succeeds, look at the TLOU 2 after the leaks non stop discussions even if it's bad.
Do people really use recent threads to find games? I remember I first came here early in its history, I think late 2016, and had been using 8ch and 420chan before mostly as well as blogspots and tumblrs (rip tumblr) I came across to find adult games. Back then they had the popular games section which in in hindsight isn't good as it gave a lot of devs free publicity who didn't deserve it as they were early good options but became mediocre as the space grew, but they got so much free publicity from here that they were able to attain milker status, ICSTOR being one of them. So I used that and the latest updates section, which wasn't as good as it is now, to find new games.
Fortunately they got rid of the popular games section, and made the latest updates section much more user-friendly, which benefits users as you'll see games which get updated much more often, accompanied by the visual of the banner and the screenshots if you mouseover. The only thing I wish is that preview screenshots would get updated more often, as they tend to get better the more development a game has.
Also there's the trending games section now but I don't use that so I can't really say anything as to whether I think it's positive or not, but at least it operates on a 30 and 7 day time scale so hopefully games that fall off don't get pushed there.
But the main problem, as with anything, is herd mentality. Unfortunately there isn't much you can do about that as people will see that it's a developer who has pushed out high quality games in the past, and is currently producing their highest quality game by far, see that it has a lot of support, and go purely based on that surface analysis. Changing that would require everyone to develop critical thinking skills but I think the world would just be a much better place overall if that were the case...