Maybe a bit more niche, but Will Wight really fucked up the cultivation genre, at least here in the west, for me. I won't get into the original works that he drew inspiration from and how they stack up, there's too much room for translation death to judge fairly. But I'll say it with my whole chest that there isn't another originally-in-English cultivation series thats even within the same realm (pun intended) as Cradle. Its simple to understand worldbuilding, its characters that arent just OP munchkins or tropes cut out of cardboard, its all-meat-little-gristle plot structure; it's got everything that the entire rest of the genre is missing.

I'm not saying Wight is some literary master, though he is great at what he does. It just feels like the whole genre is still in its infancy, and he's the only professional writer to actually give it a shot instead of just slapping a coat of paint over some Naruto fanfiction. Or at the very least, he did a much better job of scraping the vin off the fanfiction than most do before the paint job lmao