@liztai MDZS was my first webnovel and CQL was my first modern cdrama, so it's hard to say how I'd have found them if that hadn't been the case. I definitely think it helped at first that the fandom was so intense (first just me and my girlfriend being intense about it at home, and then I found out people were talking about it a lot online), because there was a lot of analysis and meta about the stories and characters that pulled me in to thinking about it more and more. That's something very specific to the time when it came out that you couldn't really replicate otherwise, imo.
Oh, and I personally was especially happy to find MDZS/CQL because xianxia was new to me, but I'd been into wuxia for a while—I was just struggling to find a way in to any wider community for it. Again, that's something that MDZS/CQL becoming a craze helped me with that's more on the personal side. I'm pretty sure you didn't need that way in!