The other day, I saw a screen capture from Tom's Hardware and so chased the series of links and quotes to try to find the earliest one that had reporting on it that was the source. That was the chain that I found.

I am not claiming that they run Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 ... but rather "this is where that story was sourced from" because everyone kept linking to somewhere else. The relevant XKCD is https://xkcd.com/978/

Funny enough, this cycle is close to what the Russian disinformation machine does deliberately to spread bullshit.

Is that actually true, or just something that's repeated until people believe it?

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woozle_effect

Yes, is there some evidence beyond the claims of "intelligence officials"?

I see what you did there.

Russian approaches are well known and documented. None of this is new, and wasn't even really that new in 2016, it's just become better known.

Essentially modern versions of Soviet-style disinformation campaigns, but augmented with new technology (social media), and without the ideological hindrances of a Communist government (e.g. sell hard to both Right and Left).

RAND Corp calls it "the Russian Firehose" model: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

Similar approaches are also used by NK, Indian, Chinese, and other national-tier disinfo campaigns. This contrasts with models used by the West, which are often less about creating a disinformation clusterfuck, and more of a "watch our Disney / BBC / Scandinavian TV & movies and their implied messages about freedom and human rights and shit".

Not too sure they are. The "experts" insisted that Russia colluded with Trump to "hack the election", that they somehow faked or planted or were responsible for various laptop and email leaks, etc., all such things which have since been found to be false or at best no real evidence has ever been produced in support of.

Obiously Russian, Chinese, and all other governments engage in information campaigns, and obviously the US government knows a lot about what they are. But we the public does not necessarily have the same information. It's not really possible to distinguish the "well known and documented (by the military and espionage industrial complex)" operation of foreign countries from domestic propaganda developed by those corporations and agencies to influence their own citizens.