Despite my trash-tier politics for much of that timeframe, I didn't fall for the anti-SJW pipeline because they're just an offshoot of G*mergate and I didn't fall for G*mergate because:

1. I actually played Depression Quest before the controversy. The controversy is nonsense when you realize Depression Quest is a free-to-play Twine game that took an hour to play. Whether the review is biased or not is less important than the fact that the entire game cost an hour of your time at most and that people who don't like VMs would only waste like 5 minutes. You didn't even need to run an .exe file since you could just play it online.

2. Speaking of game made from Twine, the talking point of pre-G*mergate g*mers was how VMs and walking simulators like Dear Esther weren't real games^TM^. All that talk about VMs being fake games went out the window when a certain Twine game got involved because suddenly g*mers would look really fucking stupid to mald about games that aren't even real games^TM^.

3. Game journos being shitty at playing videogames and corrupt isn't remotely news at that point. There's Nintendo Power being glorified ads for Nintendo games. There's game journos defending the crappy color endings of ME3. But perhaps the most infamous of all was Jeff Gerstmann getting fired from Gamespot because he gave Kane & Lynch a mediocre review. So of course, it's sus as fuck when the straw that broke the camel's back was a positive review of a free online VM that took only an hour to complete instead of journos shilling for AAA slop that cost people real money.