That depends on what platform you're working on. For example if you're advertising a product on FB and there are a lot of 'angry' or 'haha' reactions that would throw people off who were considering purchasing your product.
Again, for a company looking to hire an influencer they can only look at number of followers and engagement rate. So I wouldn't say total follower count is totally irrelevant, although in most cases they don't end up in sales. But for bigger companies branding and brand recall is more important, so they just want their brand to be visible to a large audience.