Does it really benefit the whole bulk of artists or only the biggest ones?
All artists, the smaller ones especially. If you have a purely chronological feed (which is still an algorithm, just a very simple one) then your much more likely to only see the people who post the most and who posts right before you check the feed. With a more targeted algorithm, especially if it’s being tuned to show the best content for you, not what’ll get you addicted, can show you art you’ve missed from the artists that don’t post very often. That tends to be people who don’t do art full time or just take a long time on every piece. Statistics speaking, if you’re following artists like me, who post just a bit more than once a month, you just won’t ever see their work on a chronological timeline.
Lemmy’s algo doesn’t have the issue since post rank is based on votes & recent comments and you post to a specific community, but Mastodon does. I made the same post announcing a software project I’d spent ~3 days working on at that point. On mastodon, it stayed relavent for a few hours, but on Twitter the same post kept getting likes for ~3 days and it was mostly from people who’d actually be interested in the project, and not necessarily people who follow me.
