On the one hand, the Cloudflare article doesn’t smell bad to me. As someone who gets to pay attention to this type of thing, these kinds of things really do happen frequently, and mistakes are the most common cause.

If the US government had enough access to try to intentionally do this, they had enough access to snoop on traffic with methods that would not be visible to the outside world, and they would work more reliably than these BGP shenanigans. So I’d suggest you are right about the lack of trust, even if this particular event is probably not supporting evidence. I’d also agree with other posters that any such trust was misplaced in the first place.