I know multiple companies that care quite a bit to get a good listing on PH, but I had exactly the same reaction: Are there end users or companies that actually care?
VC’s maybe? A friend in VC once told me that a number of his firm’s deals were discovered via Product Hunt. That was a while ago though (probably 2-3 years ago), so I’m not sure if that’s still the case.
I run market research as part of my job, and yeah, you'd be surprised. PH still has a lot of users and not just from the indie hacker community, but there are a quite a bit of people who look at it daily to see if something cool or relevant pops up that they can use in their jobs.
Yes, real readers but content creators (upvoters and commenters) are almost fully bots.