I don't really understand the problem here. "following" doesn't give the same content as a paid subscription, it doesn't make sense that anybody is cancelling their paid subscriptions to follow instead. a follow on substack only gets you the same content as a free subscription with no access to paid articles, so what does it matter if somebody subscribes instead of follows?

is the complaint here really just that these people want a vanity metric that makes their "subscriber count" higher so nobody can tell that most of those subscribers aren't paying subscribers?