The difference between NeoGAF being filled with some losers howling in the darkness of an increasingly irrelevant echo chamber vs an important community that has its finger on the pulse of the internet is almost entirely predicated on "gamergate... a major event in our country's history". Much like for B*bby R*b*rts, "ghostbros" giving mass dislikes to the ghostbusters trailer has to be a significant event in order for himself, with the short book worth of posts he's written about it, to be significant.
What people are truly expressing when they say something like "I was on the frontlines before anyone else" or "we tried to warn you about gamergate", as some game journalists have on twitter, is... "I'm important! This is about me!" It's really amusing noticing the difference of perspective between people who had nothing to do with it (almost everyone, even just within the industry) and the people who spent hours upon hours everyday "fighting" on twitter or wikipedia or neogaf. For an out of control flame war, it was quite easy to let it pass you by completely, which is what exactly most of industry did.
The truth is probably more that gamergate was at most a harbinger of how bad the internet was going to get in terms of divisiveness, but a minor one compared to the Tea Party movement and reactions to police shootings and BLM. Like, the worst possible long lasting effect of gamergate you can think of is utterly dwarfed by what went down on Facebook.
