I'm also worried that if I wanted to find an audience the audience would first have to navigate the AI search hall of mirrors.
They both get traffic. Neither site is optimised for SEO. Looking at analytics (Matomo on my blog, Google Analytics for the bot), the stuff I write myself gets "real" visitors. People will stumble on a project, and you can see them navigate to the next article, and the next article.
The content from the bot isn't engaging - people might stumble on it, then bounce.
Absent search, interesting content gets shared. Blog spam does not.
I don't worry too much about my content being used to train LLMs - I don't feel it takes away from me, it a bit feels like content getting indexed by a search engine. And I see value, for me, in just creating it.
as soon as i do something slightly spammy or excessive SEO-wise i get dinged for it. within 1-2 days. then i re-evalute what i did and revert it or change the strategy slightly.
those blogspam houses are just doing a few things right that are clearly being given too much weight.
and finding an audience was never easy. but social, newsletter, building free tools that link to your blog are some ways to do different than just SEO.