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Soule's accusations came in 2019, and Avellone's in 2020. The Johnny Depp allegations became public during his 2016 divorce but disappeared from the headlines for years and didn't become a major part of public discourse until the 2022 defamation trial. I bring these dates up because your post implied that MeToo petered out because of a raft of similar claims that people stopped taking seriously. MeToo took off with the Weinstein accusations in November 2017 and continued apace until the following summer, during which they slowly petered out, with the Asia Argento and Les Moonves allegations being the last major ones. The Ansari thing came out in January of 2018, and while it sort of fits the pattern you describe and was controversial at the time, even among ardent MeToo supporters, it didn't have much of an effect on the momentum of the movement as a whole.
There was always a sort of motte and bailey going on with the Kavanaugh case, at least insofar as it was discussed by Kavanaugh's defenders. There were also political considerations involved that swamped the whole thing, and I'll state for the record that neither side covered itself in glory throughout the affair. For some background, Ford privately reported what she remembered to Diane Feinstein, who was the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in July, amid speculation that Kavanaugh was on Trump's short list to replace Kennedy. Feinstein kept this information to herself until Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings were nearing conclusion in September, which required them to be extended for some time while the claims were investigated. The Republicans may be broadly described as on the "pro-man" side of the argument, but I don't think they defended Kavanaugh purely based on ideology but through political necessity. Had Feinstein quietly informed the White House and the rest of the committee of the potential scandal, there's a good chance that Kavanaugh isn't named, nobody asks any questions, and nobody has ever heard of Christine Blasey Ford. By timing the revelations when she did, Feinstein ensured that the administration couldn't pull the nomination without causing the Supreme Court to start the fall term short one conservative justice, which would have benefited Democrats.
To make matters worse, there wasn't really even time to adequately investigate the allegations. Which is why I also disagree with your characterization that their position was one of a presumption of innocence, as that implies merely a presumption, not a conclusion. The GOP and most conservative commentators did not take the position that the matter should be investigated and adjudicated, but that the accusations should be discounted on their face. "Believe all women" may not be a tenable policy, but neither is "assume all women are lying for personal or political gain". Whatever problems there were with Ford's story, it was difficult to conclude that they were fabricated out of whole cloth; she had made the accusations privately on several occasions beginning in 2012, and it would be ridiculous to assume that it was all part of some long-term setup as if she had a crystal ball and knew that he'd be nominated for the Supreme Court one day. In their hast to confirm Kavanaugh before the first Monday in October, the administration tried to limit the Senate investigation as much as possible, and when several senators said they would only vote for confirmation if Kavanaugh was cleared by an FBI investigation, the administration micromanaged the investigation in an attempt to limit its scope and conclude it quickly.
Of course we have to take them seriously. The entire movement was based on the idea that, despite awareness campaigns and legal protections dating from at least the 1980s, this kind of behavior was still disturbingly common and still not taken seriously. None of the big names that came out of MeToo—Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Kevin Spacey, Mario Battali, etc.—have been exonerated, and I haven't heard any suggestion that the accusations against them were fabricated. There simply isn't any evidence that a lot of people were getting railroaded or that nobody was asking serious questions. To the extent that most of this was controversial, it was cases like Ansari's where there was no factual dispute over what happened, just whether it was appropriate. This is why I don't understand the blowback from it, which largely suggests that none of these claims are credible and that we should just ignore them, because even subjecting the accused to an investigation would be too much of a punishment. What basically happened in the end was that women came out and said that something was true, that this kind of behavior wasn't being taken seriously enough, and conservative opponents came out and told them that they had no desire to take it seriously. That's what it all boils down to.
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