I recall a lot of it was driven by Kotaku, as well as the whole gang of cancel-culture twitter journalists.

It may be wrong, or right, but that is the narrative in my head around this. So it's probably the same in a lot of other disgruntled peoples' minds.

Kotaku had the wrong author write a review of a niche video game that nobody cared about. Gamergate was started by people who thought something totally unimportant like that was reason to send death threads to people.