People have to remember this wasn't a few creators or people talking about this and discussion wasn't limited to the extremities of Reddit.
Publishers, a ton of big and small TTRPG writers and YouTubers, every major and minor TTRPG forum, Discords, etc. talked about this.
Unless you are someone who plays or runs TTRPGs in your own space and quite literally never thinks about it outside of that - you would know about it. It probably easily came up for anyone even just looking for news on new D&D products.
I mean, think about it. 3rd Party D&D stuff - and increasingly, other TTRPG stuff - seems to do really well. That can't all be just megafans or the most engaged.
And it seems quite likely this would be spoken about in any game store.
Look. The fact that Paizo have come out and said that they sold what they expected to be 8 months of physiscal Pathfinder 2e Corebook stock in 2 weeks indicates that, in the most "only the really passionate / terminally online / DMs care about this", would inciate that near everyone discussing it went out and explored their options and bought stuff.
That feels unlikely to me.
Seems more likely that this has, and continues to have, some sort of legs, and is making me think the long term damage is gonna be bigger than I thought.