Personally, I was a left liberal for all my life, but had kinda looked into the abyss of anti-sjw and gamergate stuff, like watching Sargon and Bearing, but hadn't really subscribed to their beliefs, more putting them on as background chatter.
Things changed when I read manufacturing consent, listened to Chomsky and found Chapo at around the end of 2018, at which point I found myself as more an ancom, but Chomsky's talking points on Leninism and the USSR was never as cogent and didn't make as much sense as his other points, so I held skepticism about my beliefs then.
Reading more on theory and history, and looking more into different left tendencies via channels like Rev Left moved me over to be a Marxist, as it made the most sense to me in explaining the current and historical situation. Currently making my way through Lenin and looking more into historical ML states and I've found that I'm pretty comfortable as just a Marxist with ML tendencies rn.
Lol, are you me? This is almost beat-for-beat the same path I took too. I'm no longer involved in medical billing but I found it really disturbing how the arbitrary ICD coding by a physician could make the difference between whether the patient was fully covered or got hosed out-of-pocket.
ICD nerds rise up!
Also agree 100% with tendency infighting being dumb. Theory without praxis is 100% just "larping."
Forget where I heard it but somebody once said that history doesn't actually repeat because once you've closed the door on one set of possibilities, that event can never occur exactly the same again with the same set of circumstances. Interesting to think about.
Following, I think the best form of socialism for the 21st century is probably the tendency that has not been tried yet - the one that learns from and avoids the pitfalls of the ones that have been tried already.
That's kind of the 'history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme' approach. And it's valid, and a very Marxist view, because the material conditions are always changing.
Put another way: viewing previous socialist revolutions as prescriptive for future socialist revolutions is a dead end. The material conditions and patterns for previous socialist revolutions were different from each other (hell, just compare China and the USSR's revolutions), so it's safer to bet that future ones will be different than previous ones. (As an aside, I think that's where the weird ML focus on the few factory workers remaining is unintentionally hilarious. That path is closed to us now. We'd have a better shot at call center workers leading a revolution than ironworkers.)
But, just because the future revolutions will be different doesn't mean they'll be unrecognizable. Particularly in the reactions of capital to revolutionary conditions. And that's one of the areas where we can learn from history, from the rhythms of reaction.