You are so spot-on, Adrian. I have a few observations to add:

the editors who sit on a draft for more than 2 weeks, while every day publishing their own articles. These articles, though very long, have AI-generated content of anywhere between 30-80%. I'm not making this up. I have tested it with an AI content detector. The same one that Medium uses (at least the web service presents Medium as one of their key customers). To make things even more hilarious, the editors who produce their AI-inflated content explicitly prohibit AI use in their publications' writing rules.

And then, of course, there is this entire domain of writing-about-writing whose headlines about how much money they make, are exactly what you describe: copies from copycats. Others call it what it really is: a Ponzi scheme for airheads.