have you ever been a popular creator in a fandom?

i used to have a super long doki doki literature club fic on wattpad, it was around the start of the ddlc hype so it actually got really popular. it eventually became a chore to keep writing though, and so i discontinued it and then later deleted it at around 55k reads.

has anyone else been in that situation before? this was 2 years ago and i still feel guilty about deleting it. i kind of want to be that kind of popular person in my current fandom, but i don't write boy x boy, so it's pretty much a lost cause