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I didn't go through what you're describing, but I began browsing 4chan in 2013 at the age of 17, largely /v/, /vr/, /vg/, /tg/, /his/, /an/, /r9k/ and /lgbt/, which is what set me on the path of the chud. Initially I found a lot of the content quite shocking, but partly convincing, at least the notion of what here would be called HBD, and the equivalent for gender, and incorporated it into my worldview which at the time was mainly apolitical but leaning pre-woke liberal, if that makes sense. I'm less sure of it now... clearly innate racial and sexual differences exist to some extent, but I'm unsure how complete an explanation they are for inequality. It isn't something I ever rigorously investigated anyway, I just suspected it was probably true because the sociological explanations all sounded like total cope.
I recall following Gamergate on /v/ at the time, not directly participating, but I'm not sure I fully understood the stuff about Zoe Quinn even then. All I knew was I already didn't like the weird turn left-wing politics had taken into supporting minority idpol and wanting everything they considered problematic censored or changed, so movements which opposed that, I generally liked. I never really watched Skeptic YouTube but I certainly still agreed strongly with that whole ethos of being socially liberal, rabidly pro-free speech and anti-censorship, and anti-progressive idpol/DEI/special treatment/whatever you wanna call it.
At the time that seemed like the dominant strain of liberalism so I had no reason to call myself anything but liberal. As late as 2019 I can recall being out drinking at a gay bar and feeling completely comfortable there, it wasn't like enemy territory or something, I didn't feel like an infiltrator who had to hide his beliefs. Today I doubt I'd feel the same way, after the riots in 2020 made it clear that the fringe woke ideology everyone used to dunk on had just become what liberalism is now. Which is an issue for me, because I don't want to think of myself as conservative. I'm not some Red Tribe guy (doesn't really apply to my country anyway), not religious, I don't care about promiscuity or sexual degeneracy or abortion. To the extent I was ever anti-trans it was always on account of opposing compelled speech, not some moral pearl-clutching about guys acting like fags.
All the same I've been in effect a chud since like 2015--that's the earliest I can remember thinking importing massive amounts of third-worlders into Western nations was probably a bad idea, anyway. And I was a free speech maximalist and thought trenders were giving trans people a bad name and all the rest of it. I've been trying to hang on to that while reconciling it with liberalism, but it seems an impossible task. I've tried to moderate my views on things like trans or immigration, but I feel like it's just binary now, pro or anti, anything that isn't transwomen are women/open borders will just be seen as total opposition.
And emotionally seeing some smug Redditor advocate for hate speech laws or deplatforming or celebrating when it happens will always set me off. I can't really feel comfortable with modern liberalism if that's what it is now, to the point contrarian spaces like this are the only places I feel normal in. And even though intellectually I still think racism is bad and all that, I feel like I've lost the capability to be offended by it or any other form of bigotry.
This is just what polarisation feels like, I guess.
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