There's got to be some quantity of astroturfing going on, given the players and the dollar amounts at stake.

Some? I'd be shocked if it's less than 70% of everything AI-related in here.

For example a lot of pro-OpenAI astroturfing really wanted you to know that 5.3 scored better than opus on terminal-bench 2.0 this week, and a lot of Anthropic astroturfing likes to claim that all your issues with it will simply go away as soon as you switch to a $200/month plan (like you can't try Opus in the cheaper one and realise it's definitely not 10x better).