Yes, you are author, even though your lead authors did not include you sufficiently in the publication process.
I've been a lead author on a number of papers with consortium authorship, the largest of which has a little over 2,700 co-authors. The purpose of consortium authorship is explicitly to acknowledge that a large number of people are indeed co-authors on a study, while at the same time keeping the formatting and submission management tractable.
In the studies that I have participated in, we have used a three-tier system of authorship:
- Primary authors are the lead authors who did most of the actual organizing and writing.
- Secondary authors made personal and clearly distinguished contributions to the project, but not at the level of a primary author.
- Consortium authors are all of the others who meet CRediT standards of authorship. In most cases I have seen, this means they contributed to data acquisition in some manner, which may or may not be further distinguished.
The actual writing mostly gets done by the primary authors, who obtain specific inputs as needed from the secondary authors and circulate drafts with them until the primary and secondary groups are satisfied. The paper then goes out to the full consortium for review and inputs with a deadline after which non-response will be taken as equivalent to approval (typically ~1 week). We do the same for every round of revision, though once a consortium worth of co-authors have looked at something, it usually sails through peer review pretty easily (desk rejections are a different story).
From what you have written, I do think that the primary authors of your paper have failed in their duty to keep their co-authors appropriately in the loop for the writing and approval process. This can both feel problematic and can create problems with regards to the ICMJE recommendations for authorship. Consortium authors obviously pass the first criterion for contribution, but if they are systematically excluded from the drafting process that can create a problem with regards to the other three criteria (drafting/critique, approval, responsibility). The process that I describe, however, does invite the full consortium of co-authors to critique, raise objections to submission, and shares the responsibility for flagging issues, thus allowing consortium authors to be full and proper authors by ICMJE standards.
Let me close with an analogy that I find very useful: I like to think about authorship like movie credits. The primary authors are the stars and producer and director, the secondary authors are the minor parts, and the consortium authors are all the rest of the crew. You darned well belong in the movie credits, and should be listed in all of the appropriate databases, and it's the database's problem if they haven't caught up to using CRediT to distinguish between directors and makeup artists.
