Not joking. It absolutely was about ethics, at first. The initial kickoff was the boyfriend accusing the girl (Zoë Quinn?) of sleeping with someone else for a better review. That's ethics in a nutshell. I don't think that anyone really cared about the game, or who was involved, but rather that the state of the industry was such that you could accuse a well known game reviewer of being unethical, and it was more believable than not.

The fact is, reviewers had already sold their souls and a AAA game get anything less than a 90%. Had reviewers had better ethics, probably no one would have believed the boyfriend, and the entire story would have been a nothing-burger.

Of course it went off the rails after that, the fact that the boyfriend was lying didn't help, but for a brief moment it looked like there might actually be game news/review industry reform. It was a glorious 24 or so hours.