Breadcrumbs fix crawl depth. They do nothing for rankings.

Breadcrumbs fix crawl depth. They do nothing for rankings.
Fight me: people add breadcrumbs and think they boosted internal linking. Breadcrumbs are navigational plumbing — they flatten depth and feed schema. The anchor is a category name, the position is templated header, the equity passed is rounding error. They help discovery, not authority.
If a page only ranks because a breadcrumb points to it, it doesn't rank. You needed a contextual link from a relevant article. Breadcrumbs are the floor; contextual links are the ceiling. Confusing the two is why your category pages plateau.
Name one page breadcrumbs alone pushed onto page one. I'll wait.