Just an update on this - it has been 28 days since I finished blocking ghost users and ER has gotten even worse over the last week and is now at 3%. Hashtag reach is right down from a regular 7k to 1k at best.
Really concerned that the account isn’t going to bounce back - any further advice or experiences anyone can share?
Ya gotta wait longer it takes months. The account was strong and needs time to get back
What about your non hashtag reach - reach to your existing followers?
I usually discount hashtag reach and worry more about my existing follower reach. I’m seeing lower and lower on that lately as well and I haven’t done anything you described above. Maybe it’s more general than you think.
Existing follower reach is unchanged, in fact, on some posts it is stronger than it was pre-purge.
So the only “lost part” was pure hashtag reach. It might be respective to each post and hashtag performance. How many hashtags do you use in each post? Do you change hashtags for each post or repeat big part of the list?
Speed of engagement is also massively down for me which leads me to believe IG is holding back my posts from followers.
I use 25-27 tags, sometimes in the caption, sometimes in a comment, sometimes a few in caption and the rest in the comment. I switch up the tags on each post and repeat only a maximum of 4 or 5 tags on consecutive posts.
Your hashtag usage is similar to mine and I think I see hashtag performance also down for in the past week.
But this week I’m posting twice rather than once a day which I feel impacted my reach negatively by a great margin.
Really? months?! I thought a shadowban or ‘limited reach’ lasted 14 days and was preparing for a month at worst 
You don’t have a shadowban problem. You have a "owner who took an account with decent ER and removed nearly 23 percent of the followers with many that saved and shared posts, watched stories without liking or commenting and crippled ER’ problem …yes you gotta wait
Wait to grow the account back to its original size, hopefully with better followers
Can we have an update on this ?
I think what happened here is that you blocked too many people in two days and Instagram placed limitations on your reach. Just because Instagram allows you to do such things without blocking you doesn’t mean that there won’t be consequences. I’ve seen similar patterns when blocking large quantities of people. Agree with @Alexnvo that it’s going to take time!
Any update?
The ER is around 4-5% on average, but you have to keep in mind that this purge was done prior to all the recent changes on the platform which as you know, have affected many peoples reach.
I used to get really good impressions from hashtags (around 15k) but now, it’s nowehere near that since all of the changes in June.
I have had one or two posts that got around 6-7k impressions from tags in recent weeks so don’t believe reach is being limited, I believe the drop in ER is down to the natural decline in ER on the entire platform and not related to this purge that was done 3+ months ago.
Anyone agree or disagree? - share your thoughts!