every 'fix' GSC suggested made the problem worse for 6 weeks" - this hits home. My buddy ran a small tool review site and got flagged hard in that same update. GSC kept telling him to add more internal links to his "best of" roundups, so he did, and Google read all those new links as more doorway spam. Traffic dropped another 40% while he was dutifully following the advice. He finally pulled up a spreadsheet, killed like 30 pages, and unlinked the money pages from the junk. Took him two months to claw back but the site survived. Lesson was pretty clear, the dashboard tells you what's broken, not why.

Heard a podcast say morning pages work the same way, just get it out.

In 2011 I sat in a cold dorm room watching my cheap Dell churn through a 20 second video clip for two days straight. The fan sounded like a hair dryer and the screen froze so often I started timing the freezes with a kitchen timer. Now my phone edits the same clip while I'm still picking a filter.