I think that you can leave reddit and do other meaningful things as well. In fact it might even help you do so. And being a little dramatic might just be what some people need as a push to do it. I didn't get through all of this either, but then I have already left there.
Murdoc
Since dactyl mean finger, which can also be translated as a digit, it kinda works. 🤔
Swamp thing was what came to mind for me.
Ah, another expedition so soon? And only 2 weeks? I hope it's a short one, I've got other games to play!
(Yeah, yeah, first world problems.)
Flashing back to Red Planet.
Somebody call Tom Selleck!
"You are illegally parked on private property. You have twenty seconds to move your vehicle." -ED-209
They have a series on Gates too.
The answer to OPs question is that these people they admired were just as bad, just better at PR. Unless you think that social media has had some kind of positive effect in outing these newer bastards. Being young and naive may also have been a factor (which I can personally attest to since I was a fan of MS back in the 90s before I learned about them).
Dual booted for the longest time, until sometime last year. Windows partition is still there, but it's been long enough that I've forgotten the password. 😳
But we're not in the correct-information-only age. There's a lot of noise to filter out, and most people aren't trained well enough to do that (i.e. critical thinking). I think that we may need to address that issue before things improve significantly at the political level.
There are limits to free speech just like there are limits to other freedoms. For example: "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins." IOW where harm is done. So the question becomes do messages like this cause harm? IANAL, but I believe that it would qualify as hate speech, which is widely considered to cause harm.