You're right, Apple has a long history with guerrilla marketing, especially gray-area tactics like bots and paid commenters. Even though there is no evidence of this, it "feels" true, so it must be true, right? Why wouldn't they do it, after all? They don't really care that much about protecting the brand, and these types of tactics have zero chance of blowing up in their face.

Even though they can and do pay for the highest-profile placements, they also do shady guerrilla marketing "just in case," because they have a whole lab that just analyzes channel efficiency, and they've discovered that anonymous comments on Reddit in random channels have 8.7x the effectiveness of YouTube ads, especially among the coveted Pale Incel demo.

This is how they got to be a trillion dollar company after all! It was marketing, not product.

Paul Graham discusses this in his essay The Submarine: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

As you say, Apple would not be a trillion dollar company without a great product, but you can build something great and also aggressively market it. Nobody is saying they got where they are just with marketing.

Why do you care so much that this is a totally realistic argument? You don't personally have to like it, it's not about how it makes you feel as a fan of Apple.