I'm sure that helped, especially in the beginning, but at this point I think the number of people that value it for the community and discussion far exceeds those that use it to keep abridged of YC developments.
Still, being seen here has value in part because of who sees you, itself in part because of the VC and startup culture behind the site. Keeping abreast of YC developments doesn't even matter - some people want to hang around the water cooler where very important people might happen to walk by.
I suspect that if this were just a tech and programming forum, it would be about as popular as a niche imageboard like lainchan.
HN was already pretty popular while YC was only distributing $1M/year, back in 2010. But posting was encouraged to YC participants (IIRC), which probably did help it quite a bit.