at least on desktop, you can also carefully edit variables to manually set spawn rates lower and higher than normally possible, as long as you do it before it generates the world.
Yeah, but even at the very minimum value (which I mentioned I do) it's still just reduced, not 0. Some guys are always spawning, there's four that are always guys (football captain, guy at the party, quickie burger guy, and school cafeteria guy) and then a few more random ones appear anyway.