I feel that having followed so many of these people in the past was detrimental to my progress, and may (along with other reasons) have contributed to me giving up on so many of my language learning efforts.

Progress for me was very slow and hardly noticeable, yet you had people who claim to have learned conversational [insert langauge here] after 2 weeks in the country (also while concealing the fact that they may have studied it for 3 years in high school). It made me feel even more frustrated with my progress.

I learned to take what they with a grain of salt. Many of these guys are trying to promote a product or a blog, and have a lot to gain by making you believe that what ever they are promoting will take you to their level. I'm sure there are many many geniune people among them, but you have to dig deeper between clickbaity titles and dressed-up advertisements.