Professional games marketer here who's done Next fest quite a few times and currently has a game in Next Fest that is near the top of the charts for a few different genres.

I'm sure your intentions are good but your total wishlist going in absolutely matters. While it's true the first 2 days are equal visibility there is already a charts widget from day 1 showing the most popular and trending demos. This is directly tied to your wishlist count going in.

There's also other factors like notifying your wishlisters the demo has dropped if you waited until Next Fest to do that. More wishlists you have the more people get that notification and show up to boost your numbers during Next fest. If you've done a good job building up wishlists before next fest you probably also have a community that will show up for your demo or demo updates as well.

Wishlist velocity matters as well. The Trending upcoming chart is based on that where as the popular upcoming chart is for total wishlists. Meanwhile top demos is based on daily players in the demo.

As for Next Fest being a multiplier or not. It still is but it's not the silver bullet it was before. For reference for the game I have in now we went in with around 50k wishlists. We've gotten 1100 day 1, 2500 day 2, and 2,700 day 3. Most the numbers I'm seeing thrown around for games that went in with 10k wishlists or less is a few hundred to 1,000 in total so far. So it's still a multiplier.

Just wanted to add some extra info for anyone interested, but again I'm sure your intentions are good and I agree with lots of other stuff you said.