To agree with you, this phenomena of real observations being used and pushed by bad actors is exactly how things like GamerGate are smuggled into popular culture. In that case, they specifically smuggled in "Games are becoming female and woke." (plus targeted harassment of particular female content creators) from the pretty ubiquitous observation that 'Professional games journalism is pretty much horseshit created to drive sales of increasingly homogenized and poor games, not to critique games and drive improvement of the medium in a way that benefits the consumers or workers in those industries.'

Of course, that was also simply tapping into a misogynistic culture that was already very present and loud, and directing that into 'consumer politics'. It's not like they had much work to actually do.