The kicker is that there are valid concerns about ethics in games journalism, but GG was often hung up on things that weren't really violations at all while ignoring the real ones (say, outlets that take paid trips but don't disclose them).
I still remember how GG shrieked when it learned there was a mailing list where game journalists talked to each other... "omg collusion!" Only this was an entirely innocuous discussion group, and GG members had apparently never heard of the concept of people across an industry talking to each other. Socialization and community? What's that?
Do you even remember the whiny bitch boy's shit that started it all? Dude lost his mind and created a "cum list" of guys he assumed she was fucking because he found out they had some form of interaction (so of course obviously if a woman does anything with a guy, that means they're fucking, right?) and then obsessing over it and forming it into the grand conspiracy in which she was going to subvert all of the gaming industry to become queen of the gamers, all so she could get a blurb article about her "not even a game!!!!!!!" game on a gaming blog. That's literally what started gamergate.
Hell I remember reading some of the messages between her and him that he used to claim how she was just a lying succubus and a master manipulator. The part I read boiled down to him basically thinking they were somehow in a serious relationship even though she had moved to the other side of the country months before (and I don't know if they were ever that serious to begin with, I seem to recall her being like "well we weren't even really boyfriend/girlfriend, we dated but we never were serious" and then her basically going "sorry dude, I guess I somehow misled you by continuing to talk to you some" and then her trying to explain how it should have been obvious to him while he basically tried to spin everything as though she had been doing it entirely focused around him (i.e. so if she got involved with anyone she was hiding it from him but also somehow simultaneously trying to use it to hurt him like everything she did focused around how it would impact him).
It was just young relationship shit that some (even sadder more pathetic version of Fox News talking heads by just speculating and trashing on gaming and pop culture shit on like some shitty podcast or YouTube channel because they were angstly manchildren) assclowns looking for an ax to grind and oxygen starved forum jackoffs then blew into the pathetic gamer stereotype version of a grand conspiracy. Which, I'm still not sure on the chicken and egg situation there, as a lot of the other conspiracy shit that we now see having rotted the brains of right wingers everywhere already had started, and actually much of that led to Gamergate blowing up, and all of that has since overshadowed Gamergate. But without Gamergate and the flashpoint of impotent sexual rage of pubescent boys triggering the manbabies (that women were pointing out quite clearly while those manbabies cried "I'm not, you're a slutty bitch, I'm gonna rape you to death") that far too many men (and some women) have become, I'm not sure we'd have gotten what we got afterwards. Although at the same time I feel like it was also inevitable it was going to get worse and worse, so if it wasn't that it would've been something else.
I remember trying to tell the Gamergate dipshits that they were being manipulated for all the reasons they were claiming to be psychotically pissed about gaming journalism for, and sometimes for worse reasons. Instead they got mentally cucked almost as bad as the Germans that fell for the Nazis' shit.