Definitely agree with this point and I honestly don’t understand the people who spend all their time following others rather than writing. I think it’s more of a game to them and they wrongly think having a lot of followers = being a great writer. Couldn’t be farther from the truth. I recently wrote a story about my experiences with writing on Medium for a year now and I share some of your same insights with a few disagreements such as about the impact of writing for large publications:

The Most Common Misconceptions About Blogging and Writing