I had something similar a couple of weeks ago and hit 20K who had decided to read my article. The latest article has achieved just 10 views in one day - which feels strange because I personally think that my latest article is the better researched and written. Have you found this?
Obviously it helps that the content is good, but ultimately is very hard to predict what people will find interesting. There's also a big share of luck about how the people that are online at that time react to it.
That is very true. I actually asked ChatGPT when would be the best time to post. It came back with a local time, I posted, I failed ;-)