I'm also surprised how a small factor matters my story isn't qualified for Wattpad (no romance, and the only sexual mentions are disturbing ones)
Small trick I learned on Wattpad is, how labelling your work on a genre matters. Genres like romance, fanfiction, and fantasy have more works in it so it's harder to climb the rank and get noticed compared to others. Say, if your work is romance with historical fiction influence, it'd be easier to tag it as historical fiction.
Also if you have enjoyed some popularity in your supposed popular genre (take the previous example) such as romance, you can switch the genre afterwards to ensure visibility. My fantasy-supernatural story ranked about 600 in fantasy genre tag, but once ranked 1 in supernatural.
Do you write here too?