As a content creator, emulating past artists' works can result in benefits while also opening a new perspective on how it all originally came together. Such a project becomes a new opportunity to observe more closely while also challenging your own skills in making your own version. It becomes more about the creation process than the end result. And if you do it well, the feedback you receive can be positive and confirming of your methods. It may even give you some insight into certain aspects of your own process that you did not notice.
But there may be another side to re-creating cover songs. The best case may be that listeners will come along and praise the attempt while completely ignoring anything else you might have done. In a worse case, you will never be as good as the original artist in their eyes no matter how much time you spent working on it. In the end, you may be competing with something that you can never equal and are therefore inferior. Then there are other possibilities like someone telling you how it would be better if they could do it instead. At least with your own material they can still say it sucks, but they can't compare you to someone else who already did it. So you can dismiss it as their preference or lack thereof. It is better that some really like you and others really dislike you rather than everyone just saying you did good because they like a piece of art that someone else previously created.
Having done many cover songs in the past, I can say for certain that doing them detracts from your own artistic pursuits in several ways. Recently, I attempted to add something into my project and found that it was becoming a huge time sink because I tend to spend increasing amounts on comparatively minuscule details as I go along. Beyond that, streaming and hosts sites may not even allow cover songs to be uploaded, so those would have to be omitted from a set list at publication. Otherwise you may have to go through an extended protocol to either get permission, or accept restrictions for your production to be made visible to anyone else. So there are always these things waiting for you at the end of the project when you are trying to promote your recycled version of someone else's success.
In the past, these mini-projects have been useful exercises as well as giving breaks in between other things. Now that I have decided to scrap the rest of my cover song projects, I can put more focus on creating and less on copying. If you get some elemental idea from something that you can use going forth, these are like seeds of ideas to build from. All artists do this and you can still bury these sprouts below what emerges. After all, nearly everything that can be done has been done at this point. At least it can have it's own name, and it will be your own end to the story. And if nobody else likes it, so what... fukum.