I am getting into trading on my own (my main job was in machine learning and I studied math in university). I've also come to a similar conclusion that you pretty much have to model these "manipulations" on top of the statistics/Brownian-motion-driven behavior of any security. I am currently working on a hybrid model for something on Polymarket but it's not yet sophisticated. Do you have any resources that you can point me to that expand on this very idea of adding human behavior to financial modeling?
Without giving away my exact strategies, I'm also an ML engineer and I'll just say that ML is in 90% of cases the wrong tool, whereas simple regressions and scatter plots will unearth loads of statistical anomalies if you know where to look. You want to find anomalous behavior then hone in on how to make them your counterparty.
ML can help you optimize things after that, but locating diamonds in a soup of noise is not really where ML shines.