Having a good relationship with a good editor is pretty hard though. A lot of people - fans especially - tend to view it as a solely adversarial thing. That like, the editor is a piece of shit because their job is to go in and ~butcher~ the art. And a lot of editors can easily fall into a mentality that they are, somehow, the gatekeeper of quality and the author is basically just an unhinged hosepipe and it's up to them to sculpt things into what they want heedless of what the author desires. And because usually the most famous dumpster fires get publicized while really good relationships that elevate the final product almost never get brought to light except in interviews and end notes where the author thanks their editor (seriously; read just how many authors will include a note thanking their "tireless editor" often "For dealing with all of this when you could have just quit and moved on to more profitable venues" or something similar) a lot of people, especially those on the outside or are just getting into either side of the industry get a really brutal image of it and kind of go in with a preconceived notion that it's supposed to be editor vs author. And sometimes all it takes is one shitty partner - on either side - to fuck up someone's whole career and perception life-long.

Self publishing is still in its wild-west sort of era; but much like youtubers as of late, I think before long any creator doing reasonably well will realize how much more efficient and effective they'll be by hiring editors to help cut their own labor in half, basically, and we'll have a boom in independent editors for independent authors.