If you knocked off that much time it seems you must have been overtrained. My guess is that a more appropriate loading with the weights or the entirety of your training would have produced at least more consistent results. If the loading was right for you where you were in that time of development, you would not have elicited that significant improvement upon deletion of the strength training.
Where I see many people go wrong in this aspect of training is that their weights tend to be too heavy from the start of the training cycle(not nearly submaximal enough), therefore their capacity to adapt is much too heavily stressed early in a cycle and they have very little room (intensity) to increase over the duration of their training program. Since they are heavily fatigued early in the cycle it limits the gains they can make in many areas-including the strength training itself.
I believe (obviously just my opinion from what info. you’ve provided and what I’ve viewed with others) is that the weights did help and would have helped if you had simply tapered their use. The weights use resulted in a performance boost weeks, it would seem, after you quit them.
I think this is why most here don’t choose any one modality/method to improve performance but instead rely on many tools to “get the job done.” I would rather not have to use one or two tools to advance performance but intstead have a number of means of providing stimuli to accomplish performance improvement.