It works once your game received some traffic from Reddit or itch.io did promote your game from the beginning?
Viewing post in How to gain followers and promote my games.
It requires mostly active marketing, but not so much external traffic. I have not seen people say the tags help until ~20k views. The community and game jams are providing me the most views. My strategy is to provide feedback on others games, and then ask for feedback for mine. This works ~70% of the time. https://itch.io/t/6398595/mnus-three-plus is my 2nd best referer somehow.
I actually tried relying on reddit.com for my first ~1250 views on r/freegamefindings. It helped, but these users were very unengaged. Those first users have ~10% browser plays and <0.1% rated. For the most recent ~650, I now have ~4.5% Raters and ~40% browser plays.