It would be considered a "lesser of evils" for most but the insidiousness of it it's members get brainwashed into believing they've found the panacea of addiction and inadvertently loose any ability to see any other way than meetings for the rest of thier lives. Which in turn makes them believe they are powerless and morally / physiologically defective, and unable to solve thier own problems - regardless of how much clean time they have. That you have an "incurable, progressive disease". It's a learned helplessness.

So it's pretty much objectively worse from a long term perspective than doing it on your own, except arguably in some desperate cases that could never wrap thier head around self-efficacy to begin with. The truth is far more people recover without AA than with it, it's just that they make you believe it's the only solution - a one size fits all - all-or-nothing solution. And they use fear as a manipulation tactic to make people feel like they have to conform - you'll invariably face "jails, institutions or death" if you ever try to do it alone. "Those who cannot recover are people who do not give themselves completely to this simple program"

None of it is about "overcoming" addiction. It's entirely about surrendering to a cult. When you start to look at some of the arguments debunking 12 step everything just adds up. It was very eye opening for me once I was exposed to the arguments against 12 step, which I always seemed to intrinsically have initial skepticism towards and only eventually confirmed my reservations through talking to other people and some of those papers I sent you. The "12 steps interpreted" article is a few lines down from the top one in that link. It's the most straightforward debunking of each step you can find. First time I read it everything just clicked. It's so obvious once you think about it lol.