Hard to answer. This is extremely personal and will vary according to people’s personalities. For me, seeing the numbers and the engagement actually motivates me to post. Or, motivated, past tense, since my career is taking me away from art and as I age I don’t have the same drive I guess. I wish it returned tough.
It might be a thing of the platform. deviantart used to be great to spark conversation over artworks, but I’ve left ages ago, when they did the eclipse thing. I don’t find people connect even a fraction in comparison on Instagram or Tumblr or FB or Artstation, I get what you mean about the engagement. The trend this decade is for doomscrolling, not commenting, with exceptions like Reddit or Lemmy which aren’t focused on image distribution and collection unfortunately. What I’m trying to say is, don’t beat yourself up for not having comments. You need a ridiculously large following to consistently have comments in any of those platforms.