I really don’t think large brands like Apple have that many paid shills. Apple has a large fan base and good marketing. People that like their devices just naturally repeat the marketing line because they don’t really know why they like the devices, Apple marketing just told them that is why it is good. And fanatics will spend mental energy defending them for no good reason
Lemmy and the fediverse have sizable Apple communities and Apple is definitely not paying anyone to shill here
The RPG mechanics didn’t ruin the genre although I did prefer the mechanics of earlier CoDs where in multiplayer everything is unlocked and you just use whatever you want.
What ruined the genre was the free-to-play style monetization and season pass paid update model.
Black Ops 2 was the first CoD to have paid skins, but we would have no idea how bad things would become. By the time Fortnite came along the multiplayer FPS genre was already long ruined