René Girard is the man who worked out the theory of mimetism a couple decades ago, but he's not even mentioned here. If you want a proper explanation of mimetic theory, you should read some of his books.

> Many people are savvy enough to know that they're influenced by the people around them

Girard acknowledges that many people before him, e.g. Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, the Evangelists, were very aware of mimetic theory. You notice that when you read their works, as their characters behave in a way that is just too consistent with mimetism for it to be a coincidence. Girard was simply the first to explicitly explain the theory and work it out.

Lastly, although I, like so many others, discovered mimetism by myself when I was a teenager, Girards books were still very enlightening to me. He takes a pretty trivial theory, but works it out very thoroughly and draws a lot of insightful conclusions from it.