Competitive research is quite fun and very helpful

Hi all, I've been learning a lot on seo over the past few weeks to go with my usual saas development and really enjoying the discovery/research part of it. All through mostly semrush, poking around different sections and plugging in competitors websites. I noticed another one of my competitors has 1M+ backlinks all 'follow', crazy. Looking more into it I see they created a metric load of basically the same website with the same content, varying a little bit per website but not much and used a couple thousand domains (some .com, most .xyz). Then in their articles and across all their websites they've linked off to their main website. I can't tell if they actually made these sites or they're paying somebody but it's 95% the same website across all of them. Their backlinks jumped a couple hundred thousand in a few months almost 2x the already hundreds of thousands they had, now into the millions. Interesting to see this because I'd be keen to find out how they automated the thousands of domains and hosting of all these sites. Seemingly this play was their demise, in 2023 they were doing millions of visits, ...now barely breaking 100k. A rapid decline over the past few months and only getting worse. They haven't abandoned the website, stuff is still updated on there and social media but I wonder how theyll plan to recover from this or give up soon. I'm noticing this a lot across all my mid-level competitors with crazy high backlinks, many of them have decent Authority Scores too. I have around main 2-3 competitors doing it the right way and they've had slow steady growth over 2024. Now my plan is to figure out a better backlink strategy to outrank the mid-level ones the right way. Any other information I should be looking at for these mid-level competitors in semrush to help build my strategy? Thanks!