For me, it's more on strategy. I'm not saying that I don't look at the TA or the technical side, but I don't rely on it 100%. It's often misleading and manipulative, as ran by the whales. So I'd rather trust my own strategy that be a stupid subject of greedy whales' manipulation.
You are quite right mate, because I dont see the existence of TA without strategy coming first, even when one reads TA, it takes strategy to be able to implement whatever the TA gives, or else like you said, we will just continue falling victims of whales manipulation, but in the other hand,.
TA strategy only works more for intraday or short-term trading and I dont see it working for a long term investment, for one to succeed in making long-term investment decision, we must definitely use other strategies& methods to do so. So when talking about strategy, we also need to first know the type of trading in question.