Things I've learned from chatting with patrons at my library: The formulas for popular books continue in print because they are popular- they sell. In the self-help realm, that often means whole chapters of other people and their feel-good story of success. Some of the people who read self-help books want the promise that this one book will be the one to fix their problem and the peoples stories offered in the book support that idea. A few readers just want the positive stories (these stories are, at core, mini novels of problems resolved) and don't really care about the self-help part.

The belief of 'if I do what this book says, my life will be better' is real. Could that be translated to another format? Maybe? I can see it working as an App, maybe as a YT channel with the right formatting. Humans are odd in that, while we want the fast and easy answer, if the answer looks too easy we won't believe it works- and because we don't believe it we won't act upon/do it and it thus, it won't work (completely ignoring that it didn't work because we didn't do the work).