i never said anything about games getting popular quickly, on the contrary it was more about games being ignored and falling into obscurity. If you want your game to be more popular you should as you said post it a few days earlier and/or promote it with all your might. Well that's just asuming the game has the quality.
I have honestly interacted with almost every single one of the posts saying that they will try out games if you rate theirs. However, as of the time of writing this, my game only has about 6 rates. So in reality, promoting it with all my might, without falling into spamming people with your game link, is not working as much.
On the part of posting my game earlier, i am an amateur coder and it took me about 4 or 5 days to write the code for the game, not to mention the sprites and downloading the sfx and music. I had to scale down my project a lot, and still i had to post it almost with 1 hour and 54 minutes before deadline (keep in mind that this time appears after the extension, so in reality, i almost didn't even get my game in). What im pointing out is that this jam is supposed to be inviting to whoever wants to make a game, even if it is casually or professionally, so yeah, someone who doesnt know a lot of code wont be able to post it very early on.
On the same train of thought, your quote "Well that's just assuming the game has the quality" is kinda rude to a certain degree. It sounds like you are questioning the quality of the other games in the jam, when again, the whole idea is that everyone can post a game and promote it in the jam, regardless if they are an experienced programmer or just a kid making a game in scratch. By questioning the games quality, you are going completely against what this game jam stands for.
I'm not talking about your game specificaly. Thinking the quality of a game doesn't influence how popular it can be is wishful thinking, when i'm playing the games of the jam i look at them objectively and see if i can find the worst parts to point them out, praise doesn't make a better developer but constructive criticism can. Now talking specificaly about your game(i'm yet to try it i'll give it a shot later) with the amount of problems you say it had your expectatives should be pretty low, in my case with a few reviews and some sugestions about how i can improve i'm happy. Just what were you expecting to happen? I'm sure your number of rates will go up, there is more than a week left but i would adjust my expectations i doubt every single person can rate every single game thus some games are expected to sink to the bottom regardless of the actual quality.