Well actually i can agree what you said but getting people to play your games will be difficult if you dont do the exposure thing, you can also go to other games and then comment and if they want they will see your game or not it depends on them. but if you want your game to actually get noticed from these 1,800 games or more then you have to do the rate for rate(the right way by actually playing the game) otherwise only the people from the most popular one are going to get rated and perhaps the most ratings.
You can approach it a different way though. I have played 50 games so far and between my thread here and organic traffic, I have 63 ratings as a first jam nobody. If you look at the comments then its fair to say that a lot of people seem to be engaging with the game rather than just playing it for 30 seconds if at all and provided some good feedback which is way more valuable than 60 'rated' comments.
It's far better for everyone to engage with each others games and give meaningful feedback to improve as both parties benefit. If people took the time to act like a community that wants to improve, help others improve and are genuinely interested in seeing how others approached the theme and what they were able to create then there is no way you will not get at least 20 ratings.