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If you can joke about it, and people get the joke, maybe you should reconsider your priors for 'manifestly untrue'.
Why? As I said, the normie libs continues to exist and, indeed, to dominate. (Though tbh I'd be hard pressed to describe early 2010s gaming communities as socially liberal as opposed to merely disdainful of religious conservatives for being critical of gaming)
So people who haven't changed their ideas since the 2010's aren't liberal now, because the context changed and you can't call them liberal now for the same reason you wouldn't call an 1800's liberal a liberal nowadays. But somehow the contemporary "context" can be cast backwards, and people who definitely were social liberals back then are deemed to be not liberal, because they don't meet your Current Year standards?
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Gaming communities by my experience were solidly anti-War on Drugs, anti-foreign intervention, anti-Bush (and the aspirant neocon world order he represented), anti-censorship, anti-gun, and pro-gay marriage. Of course there were stalwart holdouts who bucked those trends to various degrees, but there was no way to mistake the dogpiles and multi-page sniping they dealt with as a measure of high popularity.
On the question of socialism, it was a mixed bag. Hugo Chavez fans were mocked for their earnestness, but there was a general sentiment of "If only we were a bit more like Sweden". The second invasion of Iraq may have had some initial support, but it was clear people had largely soured on it within a few years. "Slut shaming" and similar things were topics with no clear consensus that percolated for a decade before spectacularly erupting. Trans wasn't really thought about at all. We 'knew' that drug laws were brought about because of racism, and we 'knew' that US black people were getting the Rodney King experience every week. Noam Chomsky was a thoughtful old dude, and Kent Hovind was lol.
I know you may quibble about what constitutes being 'on the Left', but the idea of leftists feeling pushed out of communities because of rightists is something I can't even conceive of over the last 20-30 years unless we're only talking about the those on what we used to call the fringe. Today's modern SJW may have indeed felt unwelcome back in those spaces, and they may have been aggrieved enough to see themselves as attacked from right-wing forces. Wouldn't make it true, any more than a Republican forum turning away Nazis would make said Republicans on the Left.
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