Copying feels safer because responsibility appears to move elsewhere. It does not. You still hold the risk, and you now hold it without the information needed to manage it.
The failure mode is consistent: the copier follows through the winners, then exits during the first serious drawdown, which is precisely when the original trader holds. Because you cannot assess whether the thesis is intact, the exit is driven entirely by pain, and the result is worse than either trading yourself or holding the whole series.
If you copy, size it as a speculative allocation you can hold through the provider's historical worst drawdown, and decide the abandonment rule before starting. Otherwise you are buying signals and selling them back at the bottom.
Related: signal-group, parasocial-guru, herding, weak-hands