“This is bullshit to collect more money” is not a conspiracy theory usually.

Other than that, perhaps, of course, they’ve made some breakthroughs in mathematics leading to common personal machines (pretty powerful and by 90s’ cyberpunk authors’ measure unbelievable) being useful to run something like intelligence of a protocol droid from Star Wars. Such things sometimes happen in history books, but it seems there’s been enough for the last few decades, and not that often.

My opinion is that it’s in between as typical, they are just talking about public Internet becoming more toxic in the sense of security than before.

That was honestly expected to happen at some point anyway. My another opinion is that offline-p2p things like Briar are like half of the future, while that unsafe public Internet will become more similar to TV and radio and more conformist and similar and uninteresting.