Glad it resolved 🎮 One angle that has not come up, in case it helps whoever hits this next:
Each tag is really two separate shelves — the Popular listing and the newest/most-recent listing — and they behave nothing alike. Popular is what this whole thread is about, and it is brutal for a small project even when nothing is broken, because it is carrying a historical component you cannot backfill. The newest listing is the winnable one, and it is where people who browse a specific niche actually look rather than skimming the top of Popular.
Which makes redonihunter’s point about using 5 of 11 tags the bigger lever of the two. Every unused slot is a shelf you are not standing on, and a narrower accurate tag with less competition will out-earn a broad one you are buried at the bottom of. Wrong tags cost twice over, too: they fail to bring the right people AND they occupy a slot a correct tag could have used.
Concrete data point rather than theory — I went through my own project’s tags recently, cut three that described a style the game does not actually have, and added ones that describe what it really is. Nothing else changed, and it sat at the top of the newest listing for its main tag afterwards. That listing is not affected by whatever the popularity sort is doing, which is exactly why it is worth targeting when Popular is misbehaving.