I think for a lot of posts, people just comment and upvote based on the title, and never click through to register an actual view. For products this is still valuable because of brand recognition. That being said, I really doubt YC has the bandwidth to target all the competitors of their top companies.
Same here. My blog posts that hit #1 and stayed up for a while never generated over 10k views. Now, a product like Bolt or Stripe might attrack more views, but I doubt that HN even has a million views on an average day.
Yeah, my posts have been on the front page a couple of times and it's nowhere near millions of views.