Yes, you're pretty much right.

I will say there are advantages to having a smaller userbase, as unhelpful as that can be. Being unappealing to the wider market does mean that fewer people will want to shit up the site, as well as making sure the site is less likely to get attacked by external parties. I think that a lot of right-wing hotspots like this will crop up, and generally do fairly good for their niche when preferring to keep a lower profile. Scored hasn't made any major headlines, and I think a lot of outsiders just see it as a site made for people who wanted to flee reddit (just like the cringetopia site) and little else.

For more relevant things to your conversation, I should mention 8chan I think had been doing fairly well before hotwheels turned on his users, and 8kun had appealed to far too small a niche (Basically, the 0.5% instead of the 10%), one which is no longer considered meaningful in the 2020s. I think the webring that formed in light of both is mostly going at a similar pace to scored of a few small communities and several dead ones.