Yeah absolutely. I've seen non-wiki-savvy experts do these kind of edits, get reverted, and stop editing wikipedia forever because the whole experience left a sour taste in their mouth. I recently found the essay below targeted to exactly that audience, it's super useful to helping experts who want to contribute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_editors

I tried to upload an image that I took (as part of my graduate studies) but was previously published by media outlets and the whole situation really turned me off wikipedia. I think the image is still there though!

I've seen this too. Sometimes they seem like they are copied and pasted from whatever the person already happened to be writing when they came across the Wikipedia page.

A large number of my larger edits are fixing up voice / tone to make an article read more like an encyclopedia and less like an excited blog post.

What stops me editing more (usually it's a grammatical/formatting error I want to fix, or where I think a link to another page is warranted) is IP blocks. I'm logged in! Why do you care what my IP is! I have a (small) track record but most importantly it's all going against my name and if I'm doing bad things you can just block me!

I understand anon IP blocks, of course. But not logged-in ones. Especially when (afaict) all of Mullvad's (London at least) IPs are blocked.