Nobody says only vote, but by design people do only vote. It's made to disguise inaction as action, to make you feel like you have done something when all you have done is wash your hands of the responsibility.

That involves exactly the kinds of grass-roots activities your describe

Hard disagree on this one, there is a qualitative difference in acting to empower yourselves and acting to empower somebody above you, anyone who has done more than a little of both is conscious of this.

One of my 'favourite' experiences along these lines was during the lockdowns, local anarchists set up mutual aid groups and helped people do so across the city I was living in at the time (not a small one). After a point local politicians recognised that there was political capital to be made by involving themselves, so in many cases they barged in and took over, pushing everything through their own networks, and both the quality and quantity of assistance consistently declined in the places that they were successful. Their actions killed people, and not only will they never be held accountable, they got celebrated for it.

Absolutely everything here still runs foul of my original concern, when you have systemic forces pushing towards the concentration of power, anything you do (whilst of course still varying in severity) whilst not addressing this is both temporary and superficial^*^ as more and more things get redirected to serve and feed these concentrations. This necessarily leads to conflict and potential collapse, as these concentrations run out of sources of power that aren't held by other concentrations, they begin to come into conflict. You see an example in the economy at large, first they eat all of the little fish, then the big players start targeting each other with leveraged buyouts and the like. Their power lies in money, so their violence is felt and expressed in financial terms, state power lies in the threat of physical violence.

We can't just ignore the more passive (in our direct experiences) violence. As I said before, if the conditions for it exist then it will grow, and there are systemic pressures maintaining these conditions that need to be addressed before this gets any more out of hand, no matter what brief respite the next election brings.

Edit: * Superficial in that it doesn't address the problem, not that it doesn't necessarily have tangible positives for people, hence why I say "voting is not enough" and not "don't vote" (not to accuse you of suggesting otherwise, you have been clear there).