Usually when you wanted to know if a project was worth following were the number of people that put the token on their watchlist, but I'm afraid it's not a valuable parameter anymore.
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.
My question is, people can really buy bots on CMC that could do that?
I do not see why a bot like that could not exist, I have not dealt with their API for some time but if this can be done through it then it is not difficult at all for a bot to add a coin to a watchlist this way.
Now what you are seeing is in fact nothing new, there was a time in which people used the size of the telegram group of the coin to determine how good a coin was, and for a small amount of time this was a nice indicator, but then scammers realized this and they began to add fake accounts to their telegram group and scammed a lot of people in the process, so I see this as a variation of that, and as such you need to stop taking into consideration that parameter if you do not want to lose money to those scammers.