I have only see the ones on r/all and I once saw a post on AITA, where it was not obvious whos fault it was. The rest were just, as you said, people looking for validation.
Yea, when I looked for an instance to join, the activ user number discouraged me and I thought that these instances are basically dead. Maby just a baar without numbers just saying very activ - unactiv would be better.
This is really something the proprietary alternatives lack behind. I just digg the option to be able to follow a lemmy community from my mastodon account on my phone.
It could be useful as distraction.