Do you know why this initiative won’t work in my opinion?

I agree with your point that there will always be people looking for shortcuts, but in my opinion, it's not a matter of "works" or "doesn't work". With a complex system like this, the best we can hope for is continuous improvement. You make a change, see if it did what you hoped, then make follow-up adjustments. Over and over and over again while the system continues to adapt.

For things we can do as curators, I like the proposal because I think it's a step in the right direction. Obviously, I've been doing this already.

Ultimately, though, I'd prefer to see visibility for promoted posts designed into the website, itself, so that curators don't have to do anything special to find them. /promoted already died out once, in the past, and I have always believed that it was largely because curators and readers had to remember to visit a separate link to find the promoted posts.

Still, if we can make it into a link that's reliably worth visiting, maybe some people will bookmark it as their entry point into the site (I have already done that).