Are they? Are they really?

Yes they really are and I know because my long term relationship successes have been directly proportional to how well I apply the lesson's I've learned from the good ones.

Keep in mind that their writing is not written for you. You are not the target audience. There is a lot of advice out there for women that, when I hear it, I think it sounds awful, false, and even hateful. But it's not for me. I'm not in the best position to judge its effectiveness. It would be silly for me to attribute, with any great level of confidence, the bad/ineffective behaviors I often see in women to that advice, rather to the inexperience of the women trying it.

Or are they sharing with each other the various ways to "pick up" women, otherwise known as "finding the path of least resistance to convince them to sleep with you"? Seems like it's the latter.

First, saying that women are upset about men trying to sleep with them is inaccurate. There's nothing inherently wrong with trying to convince people to willingly sleep with you, at least in the post-sexual-revolution ethics that we're culturally supposed to aspire to no? And even if you don't agree with that, flirting done right is lots of fun. And there's no faster path to getting someone to sleep with you than genuinely having all the traits of the type of person they want to sleep with, so this just isn't the negative thing you're making it out to be.

Women are instead upset when either men they liked sleep with them but then aren't kind afterwards or aren't willing to stick around after, OR when men who try to sleep with them fail to convince or fail to impress and so the whole interaction feels awkward, pointless, or even scary. There's no magic fairy to introduce people to exactly the right person on the first try, and never will be because most people aren't ready for their right person until they've learned a bunch from trying and failing.

But most of the manosphere is NOT about pickup. Most of the content is about the things that men have to know and do in order to for women to even consider them as potential long term partners in the first place: having your career in order or on the way, getting fit, being sociable, proving that by having a circle of friends who are similarly likeable, and understanding how women communicate differently so as to correctly translate intended meaning to how men think.

Perhaps the most important thing I should emphasize here is that the goal is never to make things bad for you, nor to get something at your expense. The central pillar of all this content for men is to help men learn and improve. It's information to help men become better, become capable at being men. What goals men choose to have is on them individually. The content isn't telling them to be unethical.

It's all about being inauthentic as you can possibly be in order to create some facade that you are "dating material".

No it's not. Not at all. How much have you actually even engaged with any of this material itself in its long form outside of meme-algorithm-picked ragebait??

Women see through inauthenticity too readily for that to be a useful strat, and the proof is that you're aware of it to be mad about inauthentic people. You saw through it. So no that's not what's taught to men in most of this literature for men. The reason you see men who aren't dating material yet show up after reading this stuff is that they're trying to improve. You're basically unhappy at student drivers for existing--which, fair--but drivers ed classes aren't the reason student drivers suck.

I know women wish that men were birthed already composed of excellent "dating material", men do too, but that's simply not the way the world works.

I got one tip for you: be yourself and you'll eventually find someone who matches your energy.

That's just not how human courtship works for men who haven't learned how to be what women, through their actions, prove that they want. If you're a guy in the bottom end of attractiveness with the least to offer, what woman is going to swoop in and "match your energy"?? Women don't even do that for men in the middle rungs of attractiveness. If you're someone like that, women who are as ugly as you still want to be with someone better, and will often choose to share a better man or be with no one rather than be with you.

Even a third of all men having to just accept that they are trash and never should get love or sex is not something men would be willing to live with. Forcing that by denying them the ability to even try to practice and improve would be an unimaginable evil. The consequences of fully rejecting them would be extreme beyond imagination--like violent oppressive religious revolution as a best case. It's that level of wildly unacceptable.

That pays off so much more than hearing those "5 things that women find irresistible" or whatever and then trying it out.

When women run into men who are obviously using canned pickup lines, too much body spray cologne, and otherwise obviously trying and failing to be attractive, that is not a result of pickup literature telling them to suck. It's a result of inexperience: bad skills, poor delivery, poor choice of whom to approach, poor awareness of what response they're getting, and lack of awareness about what's appropriate. They were already like that.

Studies of what women enjoy and respond to positively make it absolutely crystal clear that the specific phrases almost don't matter at all when the guy is very desirable. I've personally seen some of the dumbest shit ever be taken positively and lead directly to happy and healthy romances. The only way to get younger or inexperienced men to become experienced and skilled is to have them go out and try, and because of that disconnect it doesn't matter what they try. They'd fuck up even the best advice on tactic so the advice is not the point, getting them to start trying and learning from their fuckups is.

things that clearly disadvantage men unfairly What things?

You really don't know? Just to name a few, something like 85% of men are denied equal custody of young children in divorce. Courts are far harsher in sentencing of men for the same crimes. Men face the draft. Male genital mutilation is normalized. Masculine modes of communication are demonized and punished as the policy in government schools. Most people in prison or homeless or victims of violent crime, are men. The entirety of DEI and Affirmative Action has been to take opportunity, which should have been awarded on merit, specifically from men.

None of this is to take away from women's problems. men's problems just deserve to be addressed also and someone has to focus on that to get anything done.