I never really thought it was stupid, more that it was hyperbole - but very mild hyperbole with a solid basis in reality. The endless tide of email spam would be a good example where the theory rings true.
I think the stupid part is the idea that the government was intentionally ruining the internet. I also think that around 2016 and 2017, bot spam was pretty easy for anybody with a frontal lobe to detect. The problems we saw in the 2016 election with fake news was markov-chain generated articles with explosive headlines about Hillary Clinton: the headline sounded real, the domain name sounded like a real news publication, and skimming the site it looked like a real wordpress site. However, if you read any of the content for more than 10 seconds you would realize that it was barely English and was generated by a very rudimentary bot that any CS freshman could cobble together. Their only advantage was relying on the fact that most people on the internet only read headlines. To believe, at that point, that the majority of interactions on the internet were these kind of stone age systems, was pure paranoia.
Today the situation is different. LLMs are capable of making content which is only verifiably AI generated with a few tell-tale signs as well as good old fashioned fact-checking. I dread this election year in the US because it will be so so so much easier for Russia or China to spread even more convincing misinformation automatically. They could create armies of bots which hold intense arguments with each other and have every reply seem logically sound.
