People are curious beings - they seem to LOVE social proof ie if a post has been read/viewed/liked 1,000's of times, there must be something about it, so let me go have a look as well.
With that thinking in mind, putting some tiny amount up at the start of the video publication, quickly resulting in 5-10-15,000 views, and only see it skyrocket to 100,000 views in no time will undoubtedly result in a better overall performance vs organically letting the video grow to 50,000 views in the same time period? THAT is the big question here.
Per that social proof point, Instagram introduced the "hide likes" option on its posts. You as the creator can decide whether or not to hide the likes you're getting on any given post. If a certain post isn't performing as your average number of likes per post, you may want to opt to keep the likes hidden? Interestingly, I've ran number of tests myself with popular posts I've done in the past, by re-posting them, yet hiding the likes button. And what happened? The REACH and LIKES for each of those posts were 30-50% of what they were before! Lack of social proof stopped people from swiping/engaging and moved along, hereby not getting the IG algorithm excited about that post...which results in less reach, and even fewer engagements...
Per that point as well, why did YT recently decide to force subscriber numbers to be published on the channels for all to see? Some of us preferred not to share our subs numbers with the world, so we hid them for the longest time. Now YT made the call to reveal those stats.
Why? Will an audience more likely engage with the content of a 100k account vs 1k account if one starts off knowing the size of the account? I think we all know the answer to that question.