I regularly see trots being memed about because "they do nothing apart from writing newspapers", but to me from their viewpoint (and as an anarchist) it totally makes sense and is a sympathetic view how it should be the workers leading the fight towards a revolution and the vanguard should stand aside and take the role of advisors (hence the newspapers) rather than leaders.
I feel like i'm missing something but i don't know what.
What's not micro-manage-esque about trying to build trot party-controlled micro-unions inside already-unionized workplaces to try and split the unions strength in the theatrical thought that establishing a "true revolutionary union" would somehow rouse the proletariat into revolutionary militancy because they think it somehow supplanted the still in-power old leadership or attempting outright wrecking union negotiations by manipulating rank and file membership only during union negotiations in attempts to sink it with theatrical demands for ephemeral and unwinnable concessions in hopes that such theatrics - should they cause the negotiations to fail - would somehow rouse the proletariat into revolutionary militancy.
See officer, this right here, this is the problem.
I'm sure the Poles would agree with you on that
Poland wasn't ruled by trots.
Poland however had unions that weren't party-controlled, which allowed them to be infiltrated by western agents and utilized as a tool to subvert the Polish Socialist Republic, with the largest of the bunch, known as Solidarność, spearheading the reactionary counter-revolution and plunged Poland into the socio-economic and political abyss that is today's Poland.