Basically none of the "grow the sport" people actually can or try to do anything to grow the sport -New Gen is just one of the most obviousness and incompetent leaches of this category.
The problem with athletics/tf in the US at least is that the competitions are fundamentally uncompelling as an entertainment product for the average person -not that the athletes aren't interesting enough. There's no coherent season with consistently compelling matchups outside of championships, it's hard to find meets/broadcasts, and the coverage itself is straight up laughable half the time.
The athletes we have are fantastically talented and interesting people, but we have no effective way to bring in new fans and appropriately monetize these talents. A few quirky photoshoots and articles wouldn't grow the sport even if they were done by GQ, that product done by people that can barely operate a camera sure as hell won't do anything. Marketing 101 -a funnel needs to go somewhere, right now we have good top of funnel awareness but are sending prospective fans to the marketing equivalent of a trampoline.
Turning athletics into an influencer game will destroy the sport not save it. While many of the highest performing professional athletes happen to be influencers those two categories are fundamentally different marketing channels that just happen to be somewhat muddied at the moment. The more you decouple them and drive additional ROI through influencers the more you will bleed out real professional athletics.
So if anyone actually wants to save the sport they should be looking at how to make watching competition more accessible and exciting, not taking a slice of the current attention pie.