Effects of blog posts being copied by others?

Last month, my website received a link in a guest post on a blog with decent metrics (DR56 on Ahrefs). A couple of weeks later, I don't see this link show up in Ahrefs as "new backlink". Instead, I see multiple exact copies of the article on other blogs that I wasn't aware of. All with the same link to my site. And all of these seem to have been published on the same day as the original.

Unfortunately, most if not all of these sites have metrics that are negligible compared to the original source blog (DR56). So I'm worried it's ruining the positive effect my site could have received from this link.

When Googling for the article with "inurl:...", the original seems to have been indexed on the day of publication. But when Googling for the article title in double quotes or any random sentence from the article, the original site is not visible. Instead, I see one or more of the copycats, also all indexed on the same day as the original or the day after. And it's always the same copycat site at #1 (a DR25).

When I click the "If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." at the bottom of the search results, the original site does show up in the results, at #2 or #3 (never #1).

What does all this mean?

Is it a common thing to see so many copycats copying full articles?

Is the version in the search results always the one that Google indexed first?

Does it ruin the positive effect of getting a link from the original site (the DR56)?

Can anything be done against this?