Thanks for sharing this! I think it was a great idea to immerse in the field and become an insider.

I also agree that both Instagram and Dribbble posts are far from reality and ignore any kind of usability, accessibility & constraints that you find in the real world. I was interested in those when I just started in design and used it as a 'library' to learn from.

Anyways, I actually wonder what the practical outcome of your experiment would be - does that give us any understanding of how the community focus might be shifted? How might we switch from generic misleading content on UX to something more useful and what would give beginners an understanding of what UX actually is? Curious to hear what you think!