My guess is that it's just an ego trip thing. Farming the good feelings that come from making something if the communities become successful without having to invest the time and effort to be a real part of that success.

If I'm being more cynical, it could be an effort to create a bunch of "ghost town" communities so new users search them out, find nothing, become discouraged and move back to Reddit or wherever. Possibly also burying product promotion posts (e.g. their posts and comments linking to gold/silver/crypto sites) or doing this to maintain mod control over communities in case they become successful later on. The !expatsineurope@lemmy.world, !americanrevolution@lemmy.world, !coldwar@lemmy.world, !encryption@lemmy.world, !odysee@lemmy.world, !dgimt@lemmy.world, !lbry@lemmy.world, !internetarchiving@lemmy.world, !privacycoins@lemmy.world and !goldback@lemmy.world communities lead me to suspect that it's more likely to be the latter case as they've added mods while maintaining their own mod status there.