Basically its all anti-patterns, the things people SAY are not the things popular people are DOING. And the unorganic stuff like "buying followers/email lists" isn't the unorganic stuff that you should be paying attention to.
Long story short: don't buy people to add to the list, buy the account
On Instagram, you just buy a popular account and rebrand it. Pricing is followers multiplied by engagement. You'll figure it out. 3% higher engagement is much better than higher followers. But you can get in the door with partners with higher followers.
You break even on the account by doing paid features for like a month.
The rebrand will cause a bunch of followers to leave, so THATS when you use bots like instagress to get the attention of other real humans to offset the decline. you are never actually growing the account, teenagers in Albania and India are growing the accounts. Don't fall for the time wasting ideas, unless your time isn't valuable. You buy their already grown accounts.
Use those accounts to hack hashtags for several years. I'm not sure thats a term but here is how you do it: you take the account private, and thats when YOU pay for promotions on other people's accounts to drive real humans to your account.
When your account is private, instagram queues up follower requests 100 at a time, and when you switch back to public only 100 followers or so are added at once I think. There is some limit. The point is that you always maintain a currency of new followers that you can accept in bulk at any time.
So THEN when you post a picture with almost any hashtag (based on popularity of that tag), you can accept a TON of followers that you've been queuing for an indefinite time period - also amplified by paid promotion again - and everyone likes/engages with it quickly, pushing it to the TOP section of a popular hashtag.
Rinse, repeat.
Regarding promotions again, you also want to be in a liking ring in Instagram DMs with other popular accounts. You post your picture in those rings and they like your photo, and vice versa. I'm not sure how much this works since the friend's activity feed is gone, but it can still move your photo up on other people's normal feeds if you share followers.
Its a decent place to START your funnel these days.