am very interested in this topic
i think its down to instagram/meta trying to compete with tiktok, the beauty of tiktok is that with the right content anyone can blow up unlike instagram popularity model it used for years. This obviously took followers away from insta and they saw a mass migration to tiktok
meta wants to stop tiktok growth, hence why they copied the model. Think of the rock like mc dondalds its great for a quick burger, salad, desert etc they have everything but sometimes you want something more specific and you go to other restaurants. if you put that in insta algo terms aka the rock has to many followers and instagram doesnt know what to recommend to his followers vs a small creator who has 1 or 2 types of content insta algo is confident on who to share it too etc
thats why they say less is more and why smaller creators get more views on their reels. All though i suspect insta doesnt have the "guards" they normally have in place against bots for story or post likes because they want reels to be the new flagship for the app, so numbers might be inflated right now
