A community will always consist of different categories of people, the ones that came for the incentives and the actual believers, the goal when building a new community is to try to make the percentage of believers in the community significantly higher than the incentive hunters, so if I'm to start the SNDCT community from 0, I'll launch campaign that educates readers on what SNDCT is all about and why it matters, this will target believers and in that same campaign add a custom role offer like first 500 members in the discord can claim an OG role, this will create a fomo while still targeting mostly believers.
If I took over a community in trouble?
They'll stay in trouble for one more day while I figure out my way in the server, I blend in with the members, get to know them a bit, then I start gathering information the next day which I'll then document and come up with an attack plan for the server.
I'll say from zero, it will be hard at first but it is yours, a clean slate that you can experiment with, you could mess it up but it'll still come out well eventually, if you know what you want to do
It's just like art, every mistake is a design.