It also feels like these things are making me more musically illiterate.
You see enough Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Imaginal Discs and the twenty yearly Trhä albums as super highly praised and something every music nerd should listen to, and forget what kind of music most people actually like... which if you go by the spotify charts, is a lot of slop! And if you go by the radio, it's mostly the same stuff since 1995.
True, but that also lets you stay within genre boundaries. I do something similar, and that is to see what bands the ones I like also play with.