Self Insertion

Up until recently I was ignoring anon and human stories. My reasoning was they were most likely lazy, or at least very awkward, self insertion stories. So I just filtered them out of my searches.

Then my absolute favorite story on the site was Anthro. Then I found some people use the human tag when they mean anthro and so I stopped filtering it out. Then I saw the insanely high up votes human oc stories were getting.

I was forced to consider that either the majority of the site is people looking for something very different from me or that I had made a mistake in not giving these a fair chance.

Flash forward and I am very deep down the rabbit hole. However, I can't shake that these feel like self insertion stories. So now I need to consider, why does that bother me so much? When did I equate self insert with "the absolute worst possible thing?" How do I deal with still feeling that way, still viewing these human in equestria stories as self insert, and then enjoying them anyway?

Unfortunately, I don't know. I lack that level of introspective ability. Maybe someone will stumble upon this and write something that could help me resolve this conflict. Until then, I will be finding out how someone wrote 400k words about a human named Lero.