Marimite in 2021. Yup, this year's totally weird. (Not that I disliked the doujin, though.)
I literally had ZERO interest in yuri anything before reading Marimite. Interestingly, after I heard of it, I couldn't find it in English and I didn't want to spend a couple months painstakingly reading the Japanese original. Then I found a version in French. So all the soeur stuff was literally like "Soeur in French is Soeur" which is amusing, or "Your little sister, which means little sister." But anyway, Marimite was so well-written I looked for other stuff like it and it was all manga and doujins I think Strawberry Panic was next and then Oneesama E and Utena and then Sailor Moon (to understand the doujins) and so on. Then I found people like Morinaga Milk, etc.
I discovered a French version of Welcome to the NHK about that time and it was well-written too, but for some reason I got the idea fixed in my head that the yuri writers tended to be extraordinarily talented. And the writers from Morinaga Milk going forward really were.
I have watched and rewatched Maria-sama ga Miteru the series, and the live action version was the very first movie in Japanese that I watched without any subtitles and understood the whole movie. My conviction that Japanese yuri writers are amazing hasn't changed, although it's been tempered.