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This is true but I don't think it's the whole story. This is anecdotal, but if you were online and involved in gaming discourse in the late 00s and early 10s you would probably remember that gamers and journos already had a kind of culture war going on at the time, but it wasn't yet political. It was over things like day-one/on-disc DLCs, microtransactions, always-online requirements, streamlining in search of a "broader audience," shoddy reboots, and who could forget the Mass Effect 3 ending fiasco? Gamers and neckbeards complained endlessly about these things on online fora, but curiously the gaming journalists always seemed to take the side of the industry, calling gamers entitled manchildren for caring about this stuff. It wasn't until a little later that the Great Awokening happened and hit gaming journalists early, so they started complaining about immoral content in gaming and calling for it to be censored or changed the way conservatives had a few years earlier, and that was just another rift that opened between the two sides. I think among some gamers, they actually felt a sense of betrayal that journalists would do this after dunking on Jack Thompson with them years earlier.
Anyway, I think Gamergate was really just the largest battle in this already-existing war between gamers and journos and the point it became political, and for a lot of participants on the gamer side it was as much about stuff like this as it was about Zoe Quinn or feminism. Even on the journo side, actually--that's what all the "gamers are dead" articles were about, journos had seen gamers quarrelling with them and the industry for years at that point, acting entitled in their view, and this Zoe Quinn thing was just the latest flareup.
I think that's part of where the ethics talk came from as well--because journalists had a track record of defending anti-consumer practices in the gaming industry, a lot of people may've suspected it wasn't just about one dodgy review, but that journalists were probably shills being paid off by the industry to dismiss legitimate criticism of their business practices. To my knowledge no evidence for that was ever uncovered, but it was a suspicion I'd wager a lot of people had.
This is not my recollection. Some sites probably did this, but there was always a significant chunk that decried this sort of stuff either implicitly (e.g. consistently highlighting bad industry practices) or explicitly. I remember Oblivion Horse Armor being pointed out by journalists as a bad omen. I don't recall them doing any sort of concerted, major push for "you need to just accept this, losers!" The Xbox One reveal was similarly panned. Heck, some former journalists became full time commentators calling all that stuff out, like Jim Sterling.
Probably the biggest difference between the mainstream gaming press and regular gamers was the reaction to Mass Effect 3's ending. I recall most sites at the time going "meh", like it was bad but not terrible. Eventually they basically got bullied into adopting the popular view that it was the video game Crime of the Decade, but there was indeed that initial week or 2 where they underplayed it.
There were pro-consumer journalists at the time, of course, but I do think there was a perception among a lot of the people kicking up a stink about this stuff that their concerns were often not taken seriously by mainstream journalists. Admittedly though I was a teenager back then and not following it super closely, so it's hard to recall the sequence of events perfectly. I just remember that at the time Gamergate definitely didn't feel like an isolated event, but rather part of an ongoing series of consumer revolts or, less charitably, nerdrage episodes that were pretty common in the gaming space back then.
Regarding Mass Effect 3's ending in particular I definitely remember journalists being quite adamant that calls to change it were illegitimate and that it would be an affront to the game's artistic integrity to alter the ending to appease angry fans.
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Oh sure, I'm aware that the Zoe Post was just the catalyst for a whole bunch of cultural issues which had been stewing for years prior. But I still think it's misleading to say that there was an event called "Gamergate" which took place in the period 2008-13.
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