Imitation is how everyone starts, and it works well until it stops giving you anything. That dissatisfaction is not ingratitude toward what you learned; it is the signal that you have absorbed enough to have your own questions, and the copied approach can no longer answer them.

If what you are making feels hollow lately, it may be that you have outgrown the model rather than lost the ability. Try changing one thing deliberately away from how it is usually done, and see what happens. The originality begins as a small deviation, not a break.