Old guy on a bike started out posting extremely grainy videos of his rides around Cape Breton, Nova Scotia and on the Island. The vids have nothing but wind noise, no commentary, and were usually sped up multiple times as he rode these roads. You couldnt really see the scenery, there was no commentary and you had to turn the sound down because of all the wind noise. But... for some reason this guy has picked up almost 3000 subs over time.
Re: old guy on a bike... Subscribers do not equal success. In fact, a lot of unengaged, uninterested subscribers can do more harm than good.
He has 3k subscribers. In the past 30 days he got 10k views, and 67 new subscribers. He has 216 published videos.
I have 5k subs. In the past 30 days I got 32k views, 142 new subscribers, and have only published 133 videos. I don't think he's actually performing that well, for his size channel.
Likewise, there are channels his size and my size that get way better engagement relative to their size. There are always people doing things better, but the point is that he really isn't getting all that much engagement for his size, so don't worry about subscriber count, that's not what measures success on YouTube.
As for that second part, uninterested subscribers will see your video in their subscriber feed, maybe even their home page, and they will see your thumbnail, and they won't click on. And youtube will see that, and youtube's algorithm will think, okay, this video stinks, no one wants to see it.
If I could have 300 really engaged subscribers, or 3,000 people who never watch my videos, I'll take the Spartans.