Link Placement Rate and KW Best Practices for Highest Tier -or- How Do I NOT Ruin My Sites' Rank?

Deeeeeeee

OK, GSA friends, I have some fundamental questions. Yes; absolute first-week-SEO newbie questions not at all appropriate for someone having done this as long as I have. What can I say?    I'm trying to fill in the gaps...but there are many! lol

Many SEO ppl will tell you to only use your KWs at tiers NOT directly pointing at the site you are trying to backlink.

I never followed that. Even after a lot of  people stopped pointing KW anchors at sites, apparently.

So, usually most SEO people use the brand or URL, no?

Presently, I am just running SER projects creating  links pointing at my sites that are brand, URL, and generics.

The thing is, I already have tons of backlinks right at the site that are KWs and variations. Is that not good? If not, why not? (Link sources vary and are not just from SER)

Should I stop with creating these contextual (and other) KW-ANCHORS>SITE in the future? Completely?! If so, why? What's the harm??

Do websites usually/always/sometimes recover if you overuse  KW anchors pointing directly at the site? Pages that disappeared, I usually can bring back to visible  SERPs by fixing KW ratios. Same had gone for pages in the 40s - 60s range of G results. Usually it was too many KWs for that anchor.

I also have questions about link placement rate. I used to limit daily links (directly at sites) to very low 2-digit number, usually. I did run a few projects without stops or drip-feed delay between posts and that page dropped a bit.  Did I do this?!?!?!  I've also had projects dumping links directly at sites in the last few years. It didn't seem to usually do much good, and perhaps even harm.

 What about link rate to links pointing directly at your site? If you don't drip feed or cap total number in a day, is that some sort of soft penalty that expires?

Thanks, in advance, for all the help.