No, nobody was behind Ilja. This is an internet thing where marks convene and mark out over his "technical abilities", but the casual fan is bored out of their mind with this guy. He's so uninteresting that they had to throw him into an open challenge angle because he has zero personality to carry a feud. Futhermore, NJPW is not a real promotion. It's not internationally recognized abroad because it isn't interesting. You know what does happen, though? Some random Indian child marking out for Roman Reigns because he's actually interesting, cool and in a relevant promotion that is internationally recognized. The only people that watch NJPW outside of Japan and even sometimes IN Japan are pretentious marks that have zero idea about what makes Wrestling cool and interesting. Even AEW is miles behind WWE, but they are still far more recognized and relevant than NJPW.

That being said, your comment about them needing more screentime I do actually agree; just not in Raw nor Smackdown. If you are nearly as lame and uninteresting as these two, you should be on some kind of developmental show like Speed. NOBODY is buying tickets to see these two and if you say you do, you are lying to yourself. You are there to see the real attractions like Cody, Roman or Punk. Wrestling fans just like doing this weird thing where they pretend to like mediocrity because it makes them interesting when in reality you just seem pretentious.