Knowing how scammy dating apps are, they'll probably use bots to juice the numbers of apparent users a specific gender and have the bots lead on a bunch of humans and have them pay for tokens/waves with real money for a virtual experience.

Is that not literally the value proposition of dating apps? They aren't showing you potential matches alphabetically. The question is just who has the most suitable algorithm for you.

We’re talking about conversations, not the matching algorithm.

Except that candidates with more choices(presumably more desirable) will be the first to walk away from such subpar treatment.

This is a whole class of problems - lowering barriers attracts mostly the wrong crowd, raising barriers scares away the most valuable participants.