Then Charles De Gaulle came out of retirement and promised to write a new constitution, and since he was widely respected by both the military and the general public, everything settled down. Of course, this technique only works if you have Charles De Gaulle.
On the one hand, things like social media make “blowing off steam in private with your mates” basically indistinguishable from what used to be “going out of your way to send a letter to someone to harass or threaten them”. I don’t think that’s a reduction, so much as the system not accounting for the changes wrought by tech (see also: Robin Hood Airport trial).
On the other: while I expect anyone known to more than 1000 people to have other people sounding off about them — and while I expect anyone known to 100k Americans to have indistinguishable-from-plausible threats from gun owners who gained those guns despite specific delusional mental states that ought to have excluded them from gun ownership — Jan 6th had more than just that: it had the extra level of demonstrating that there were a lot of people who were not merely performatively angry FirstnameBunchOfNumbers internet accounts but real people with the means and motivation to travel to DC and to force their way into the Capitol building and private offices therein, to bring Molotovs and pipe bombs with them to DC, to not merely chant “hang Mike Pence” but to do so when someone had set up a gallows (or vice versa, timeline unclear for me).
If anything, rumours to the effect that Republican senators/representatives are only still publicly supporting Trump because they fear armed Trump supporters, could (iff true) be a relevant example.