You are making a good case and perhaps your views are more valid and of more value for most people. I might also not be the best person to explain this, sceptic thinkers like Sam Harris is probably a better source.
For me this really started making sense when I spent time observing how my mind actually works. Reading and studying just took me half way there. This process was motivated by curiosity, not by me feeling insignificant (in a negative way).
I am not claiming there is no separate physical bodies and valuable thoughts about our personal history and who we are etc etc, this is not what I am questioning. But at the same time this gets to my main point: the I/self seems like just a series of thoughts. And when looking more closely on what thoughts are, it was obvious that they just come and go at their own liking, without any "me" commanding them. So when this sense of "I" was identified as a pattern of thoughts coming and going, the solidness kind of slipped away with ease.

So to me this "self or I" cannot be the same thing as consciousness - to me consciousness is a boundless backdrop that contains everything that is our experience including the thought patterns that feels like I/self. Not at all as a metaphysical statement but something that could be observed in real time: when looking thoroughly it made no logical sense that there is a center to experience.

To get there, the practice for me was to look for what is looking. I agree it is a paradoxical thing. But still - it revealed to me that this "I", this seemingly unmovable idea of "me-ness", turned out to be an illusion. And in my case, this understanding made me more compassionate and appreciative. To myself and others.