But are they actually serious people? I had corporate astroturf accounts arguing with me on my otherwise-ignored blog as early as 2004. All this time later, I just assume that every serious corporation employs PR firms using sock-puppet accounts to shill in favor of whatever dark shit they're doing, acting like it all just really great and good for us.

We've seen this on HN before as well. Companies targeting blogs and reddit with LLM generated content that "subtly" name drop products or services, fake praise, and even meaningless "support" requests on discussion boards.