Advertise outside itch.io, obviously. You're not supposed to rely on local traffic anyway, and organic traffic is a lot more effective. Use social media. Whatever else you can.

Also post more in the community, because people can't know you exist if you're silent.

that have 1k+ followers and their content is just a few projects and not very interesting.

To you. They are not interesting to you. A thousand people have a different opinion than you about this. Also, you do not know for which of the projects the accounts got followed to be notified of updates. Of course some follow to get notified for new games as well. But this ain't youtube. You do not need to post dozens of games to get followers.

and that should interest at least 100 people on itch.io

That will neither give you 100 followers nor 100 ratings. It might give you 100 page views. And maybe 10 plays, half a comment and half a rating. There is some thread here where people posted statistics.

To put it into perspective, I know games that are on Steam and have literally thousands of reviews, but on Itch they have less than 10 ratings. The account is older and managed to accumulate a whopping 100+ followers over time.

It seems that the "most played" and "featured" games steal all the attention

Makes you wonder how they got on those lists. Especially the popular ranking. You seem to think that this is like youtube. Post one video game, get 10 followers. Post the next video game get 5 more and get views from the previous followers. Post the next video game and get even more followers to catapult your next game on top of popular games.

While it is obvious that an account with 1000 followers will get some initial boost for posting a new game, I do not see this mechanic happening very much. At least not on the popular games. Maybe it happens with the accounts that have 20 games and 20 followers. But if you look on top of the lists, you will find that many might have like 3 games and 1000 followers.

I just looked at a popular account with 12000 followers. The hit game on that account has about 1000 ratings. But there is also a game on that account that only has some 20 ratings.

So my opinion is, while followers might help, the game itself is more important.