The culling was definitely a part of it but IMO is not the reason sole reason council lagged behind in sub, a very good proof of it is Irys, she had an absolutely insane debut WITHOUT any culling, she reached 200k before debut, 300k during it and was at the time the fastest Holo to reach 500k, yet here we are 2 years later and she still hasn't reached a million and is around 500k subs aways from the lowest member of Myth, the tru is that and some point after Council debut EN grow slowed to a crawl compared to before, why? Well it could be many reason, the end of the vtuber boon is probably one of them or even could say some of the issues EN was facing at the time were to blame too, like I really loved council, but they struggled hard with adapting to being streamers at the beginning, Mumei was a student who we already struggled with keeping up her grades even before Holo, Kronii admitted that adapting to being a full time streamer was new to her and she was struggling and Sana had a laundry list of things that happened, not to mention Fauna had technical difficulties one after the other, plus being a perfectionist, she basically didn't do ASMR, her supposedly main content, for months due to it, only Bae really hit the ground running, now they are all IMO great in their own way but I do feel they failed to ride their own hype.