that doesn’t sound like a good reasoning to me. how much power can a lemmy moderator have? not much. having a big community on a platform like this is more responsibility than benefit.
most communities were simply built so that people would have spaces to post at first. think of it like helping build infrastructure. when this community was created, for instance, the default lemmy.world community was basically the only active one around. then this one popped up along with many others, and people supported what served their current interests best; others stayed inactive. Most mods will still respond to requests even if a space is empty, afaik.