he carrier is a protoss air unit in StarCraft, it has many interceptor drones that it houses which scale outward to attack the enemy.

I’d say there is a huge amount of bots, then the smart bots, then the actual shills. The smarter ones run complex operations and are able to use their own power to self propel their own stories. And there are a lot of similar ‘power users’ who are not wholly paid for by someone but would do work for the highest bidder. I’d bet that yes, 50% of what’s on the front page of major things is reputation management or Hail Corporate stuff, then I’d wager the mostly less popular stuff is actual people, with a ton of bad posts from all sides at the low popularity

But what is unique is the fact that we have an extremely well preserved corpus of text surrounding him.

IIFC all those writing are dated to well after the life time, like 100 year past it or so. It may be a bunch of written things but there is no/little reason to take those writings as anything but written down stories.

Ever play Telephone with a single word for 5 minutes? Now do that to a epic for 100 years, the end result will certainly be something but it may be nothing like the truth

Sounds like the CCP approach to twain with the "but a ‘kingdom’ in the past had this territory so we are entitled to it.