Yeah, a lot of my opinion has just been from personal experience, friends on FB and other places who claim to be 'independent' yet all their 'likes' etc. are CNN, MSNBC, and anything else democrat.There's some truth to this. Not completely though. I consider myself an independent in that I don't like either party, and being a joiner is just not in my nature. But I am political as ****, obviously, lol. I eat, sleep, breathe politics, unfortunately. I tend to vote Republican, even though I think most Republican candidates are trash. They're evil, but least evil. The Republican party is the only one of the two that allow sane policies to be sought. Democrats cancel their own for not being progressive enough.
But, on the other hand, I think that like you say, a lot of independents are pretentious liberals. I know some who say they're independents, but are quite friendly to Marxist ideas, and claim that they're not political while being activists for absurd climate policy.