I’ve stumbled across your post merely by coincidence and It is very insightful. I recently found a couple accounts offering and asking for help on projects here in the Forums at Itch, and yet they have no following, no actual presence on their own profiles nor a configured page in Itch. They usually are accounts with a couple months of existance to a year, no profile pic either and their interaction is limited to the forums, usually asking to connect via Discord. I am frankly let down by all these suspicious agents in the platform, and other parts of internet too.
Yet another angle to scam and trick people, probably. I think I recall seeing such. It is scams aimed at developers, instead of scams aimed at users.
Unfortunately, this is hard to distinguish from genuine people looking to collaborate on a game.
What's massivley going on the last few weeks is link spamming.