Are Small-Medium Affiliate Sites Dead?

Mine's been hanging by a thread in every single core update release. It peaked at 30K visits in September 2023 and since then it hasn't recovered really well. This December, I'm getting negative spikes from 12K visits to 9.3K in just a few days. What am I missing? I'm doing high-quality and people-first content, page speeds are A+ on GTMetrix and PageSpeed, and internal links are relevant and contextually built. Haven't gone off-page this year yet but the ones I mentioned worked just fine for me. Should I just throw my hands in the air and let the core update roll out first?