~ but I'm afraid it's not a valuable parameter anymore.
It's never been.
Many unknown coins/tokens have an insane amount of people that put them on their watchlist in a very short period of time, for instance, a token that's been added to thousand lists in like minutes since their listing on CMC, very strange.
That sounds plausible if the token/coin community already have strong masses.
people can really buy bots on CMC that could do that?
Why wouldn't?
There is a service that sells honeypot/scam/fraud smart contracts. If someone wethers it is legit or not wants to spread hype about their a brand new project, there will be a service for that. Not to mention that, most token are built based on meme, hype, influencer, etc. There will be shady things that people will use to gain benefit for their own.