I've been having a lot of success with spinning articles, editing them and including my anchor text then manually posting them to various platforms. It's a bit tedious, but my stick rate is really high and it doesn't take me terribly long to do.
I'm interested in doing more automation, but I'm kind of obsessive about the quality of what points to my sites (probably to a fault). It has served me well so far. I plan to test out spinning an article I find, editing it, then just trying some sentence rewriting and some synonym replacement to see if I can reliably get a good article out of it.
If not, I'll just continue doing what I do. I use tools like GSA content generator to help put together some base articles for me to human edit. That's nice because it will fetch and insert videos and pictures for me and I can also have it insert links if I want it to.
I'm currently testing a few link providers on here to see what their stuff looks like and how well it works. I might use their services for my tier 2 and point it to the stuff I make for tier 1.