The "everything is political" mindset and the rampant pretentiousness and pseudo-intellectual tendencies of the various SJW subgroups of the Woke Left is partly because of its strong background in academia but also it's likely a response to the anti-intellectualism, hedonistic escapism, and the celebrity gossip culture that was a big part of the wider 2000's pop culture zeitgeist.
I think you are on to something. Remember, most of the woke culture took root in Anita’s videos. Looking at them fully, a big reason she caught on was that she presented herself as one of the many essay channels around the time. Back then, you had losers like extra-credits and MovieBob trying to have these in-depth discussions about gaming and how it is high art. This was likely a counter to the popular “dumb people” entertainment created by James Rolf and Doug Walker as they had cartoonish characters yell and scream at their topics rather than actually review them. This transition is actually pretty apparent, I recently watched a Deadwing stream where he went over multiple AVGN rip-offs all of which were pretty much only on YT for the first three years of the 2010s. Nowadays, all the popular game review channels all have to be smart in some fashion, gone are the days of AVGN, in is giant essay style content lasting an hour at a time. Movies are even worse as it is nothing but people like High-Top Films going over the stunning filmography of Spider-Man movies, or explaining why Marvel movies matter. This all to say, as a culture, we are pushing to be smart now, which is consequentially, making us dumber as we are placing too much stock in the deeper meanings of otherwise mindless films
Back on point, Anita and her followers latched onto the changing culture, which is where they succeeded. The Pop Culture Detective is an imbecile beyond belief and literally just restates the obvious (check his Star Wars video), but he presents this very intellectual structure to all videos, which aids in peddling the stupidity. He seems intelligent, many of these essayists seem intelligent. Even MovieBob was able to hide for quite a while, hence why they are probably more dangerous to culture than you dumb AVGN clone. They provide an illusion of intelligence that plays to people’s egos and thus causes them to go along with it as they are now intelligent.
Problem was they swung too hard in the opposite direction to where "everything is political", having fun is a sign of "privilege" and is therefore "problematic" and the "you talk like a fag and your shit's all retarded" anti-intellectual mindset of the 2000's was replaced with the hyper-pretentious and extremely postmodern pseudo-intellectualism of the 2010's.
I think the issue runs deeper than political in all honesty. A lot of this started prior with the inspirational/ deep quote girls, the obviously insecure animation and video games are art peddlers, and really just fandoms in general. I would probably also say that South Park played a major hand in this as well as many took their intellectualism from that and have all become way more cynical than that series ever was, likely due to the constant pushing of its smart episodes like the Scientology bit. I think that the 2010s has really just been a bad bit of people trying to find acceptance for many interests, be it gaming or animation, or comics, or whatever. Maybe the anime boom of the 2000s even aided in this as somehow Japan can see things like a comic or cartoon as adult, yet America cannot, so now these super insecure people who were likely treated as losers for years need to vent about ‘how actually...Looney Tunes was made for adults back in the day‘.
I will give them credit, they are not wrong, but they do need to tone it down. I remember the animation community being big for me back in the early 2010s, but I ended up leaving as the whole movement devolved into 24/7 insecurity and pseudo-intellectualism rather than appreciation. Steven was held on a pedestal because it had adult writing and they really went hard on TTG because it would make animation look like a children’s product. If anything threw animation back into being for children and manlets, it was the animation community, not minions or TTG.
