sure, there's just two things to bear in mind.
creative recognition is a matter of luck. you can spend hours crafting a post, only to find out that the time you posted "neon genesis eggbugellion" is now in a post chain 12 people deep.
if you want your stuff to do the rounds, if you want to do numbers—you gotta just keep making things and seeing what sticks, there's no real trick but persistence
the other thing to note is that popularity isn't all it's cracked up to be. turns out a lot of notifications stops being fun eventually, and sometimes a "hit post" will drown out the other things in your life
i'd advise to post what makes you happy, over catering to an audience. the mad scientists doing css crimes are likely doing just that, unleashing a horror with a cackle.
personally i've yet to do css crimes, but i've had a few posts pop off: a stupid joke (people love nostalgia) a half-assed computer post (people love learning new things) and stirring the fediverse pot (people love a bit of tongue in cheek flamebait). for me though, i don't post to get clicks, i post to talk at length about my hobbies, or i post to remember something later on, plus the occasional bad joke.
i'm not saying "just be yourself and you'll be popular" but "be yourself, you'll have more fun doing it—you never really know what's gonna resonate in advance". hobby posting might not get you all the attention but it will help you meet other nerds to bounce ideas off.
As a prolific creator who has a lot of experience "working the system" to go viral I have lots of experience related to this. My credentials here are that I've frontpaged Hacker News more than most people despite never using Hacker News, so I understand pretty well what makes social media "tick".
I know that @tef was talking more about tweets and small chosts rather than long-form content, but the exact same phenomenon applies to long-form content, too (e.g. blog posts, programming projects, games).
First, if you're really serious about gaining traction as a creator, DON'T RELY ON COHOST. That's not to say that you shouldn't share your content on cohost, but you should also share your stuff on other sites that are specifically optimized for engagement and content going viral (e.g. Reddit). In other words, you have to be a little shameless if you truly desire popularity. You don't have to be very shameless, but just a little shamelessness is not only okay but necessary.
Second, what @tef said about an element of luck is VERY true. You will not be able to easily predict in advance where "lightning will strike". You can try to optimize certain factors (like the time of day or time of week you share your content), but ultimately no matter how great of a job you do there is a substantial element of luck involved. I've had creations of mine that I was very proud of get a very lukewarm reception and, vice versa, other stuff that I was not very proud of would go extremely viral.
Part of the problem is that creators tend to be poor judges of what makes content popular: very often creations are not popular on their own merits. A great example of this phenomenon is Hacker News posts. The only thing you need to front-page Hacker News is an inflammatory title and that's basically it. I'll give you an example of such a title:
"Everything you know about Nix is wrong"
I'm pretty confident that a post with that title would front-page on Hacker News, regardless of the content of the post. Why? Because most of the people who come to Hacker News aren't interested in reading posts; they're only interested in using the title of the post as a discussion prompt for arguing with other people in the comments section. Once you realize that you begin to understand that it's not really the achievement to frontpage Hacker News that some people think it is.
Lots of viral content on social media is like that Hacker News example: users typically don't reshare content for the content's own sake. They typically reshare content for two reasons:
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The content promotes themselves
In other words, it helps amplify what they are trying to say or is "on brand" for themselves
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The content promotes you
In other words, you have cultivated a cult of personality and people are resharing your posts because they want to promote you, and not because they particularly care about the content you're sharing.
I'll give you a concrete example of the latter phenomenon: a lot of people worship power (even those who think they don't) and form cults of personality around those they perceive to be powerful. At the beginning of this post when I humble bragged about how many times I front-paged Hacker news that increased the likelihood of this post getting reshared because it taps into people's instinct to promote those they perceive to be powerful. That's another reason you have to be a little shameless to be a viral content creator because you have to be willing to harness peoples' authoritarian impulses.
Either way, it gets pretty depressing to realize that the actual merits of the content don't matter. What makes stuff go viral is far more about vibes/symbolism/tribalism/signaling than merit. It's really stupid and it will make you feel gross (unless you're a sociopath), but any professional creator has to grapple with these phenomena if they want their work to go viral.