When was Product Hunt ever relevant? It's been a joke from day one as far as I can see. Just more inward looking, meta navel-gazing crap. Like you say, the intended audience is not real users anyway.
Unfortunately, a lot of new entrepreneurs took Product Hunt to be gospel, and getting on the top of Product Hunt to be the primary objective of a startup launch, even if it means gaming the system.
The thing is, even if you had 3000 upvotes for instance, all you will most probably get is fake hope of a successful launch, upvotes will be mostly either by: other hunters, founders, infuluencers who didn't even read the description or care a bit about your product, or by newly registerd users who want to skip the welcome page or just trying to understand how this website works by upvoting anything on the home page and then forget about it.
I registered on PH once to post about my product. It made me upvote at least 10 products across a span of 3 days (should be 3 contagious days). You know how I did those.
They added the 3 day check to reduce spam from newly registered users.