This is actually the start of a great idea, it's not far off from the 'collections' feature that already exists [private or public collections of projects that users like] but what indeed does make this different from existing collections as implemented, and why it matters, is really the fact that collections now don't have all that much to notify you when a thing in your collection has changed or updated. I approach this from a creator POV, but for players it's also a useful feature. And currently there's simply no feature on Itch to handle that situation of project-specific updates.
I myself personally have a bunch of 'follows' and 40 'followers' so clearly some people on Itch do use that, but not most. It's like the Itch.IO star rating/review system, it's not being used anywhere near enough, or well-understood or noticeable enough, to be useful to most people here.
Itch's setup for tracking and interacting with projects, users, etc... it is a hodgepodge of features that should be better connected to each other in some way. We have collections, that's nice, and ratings, and follows. Is there some way to streamline these functions and tie them together in a singular panel? We don't really even need a wish list per se, but some sort of merging of the collections/follows that includes all of the best features of both in a single, robust system.
When you realize you have had thousands of people visit your profile and 40 of them followed you as a dev (not a specific project even, just... you as a developer? sort of?) and a completely different group of people put you in various collections, and only one person has reviewed you (a person who's seemingly not in either of the other two groups) you realize how problematic and messy this is.
I have had around a hundred $ in sales total by now - all asset-pack stuff - but the audience that is interested in that content is expressing that interest in a ton of different and disparate ways that do not intersect much and are very uncoordinated.
I can't help getting the feeling there's a weakness in the Itch community and site that's not only my own decisions [yeah, I'm sure I've made some mistakes in my profile and that's a part of the experience I've had], but also more platform-wide and structural confusion for users. Connecting and improving these mixed up features won't solve everything, and undoubtedly it will pose a challenge to figure out how best to do it, but if you get it right... it could help. It could be a start to making that better.
--Matthew L. Hornbostel, https://matthornb.itch.io/