As far as I knew, the issue which blew up bad was not at all about the original accusations re: Zoe Quinn and her boyfriends. That was a legitimate debate in its own right, and for the most part proceeded calmly and seemed to be more about gaming journalism than Quinn (to quote someone in another thread on the topic, "if this is true it reflects far worse on the boyfriends and the establishments they work for than on [Zoe Quinn] herself, who may not have even done anything wrong.")
The issue was that when the story began to circulate, pressure was placed on several sites to suppress discussion of the topic or outright silence criticism of the situation for various dubious reasons, most of which were based around the idea that it wasn't fair to include Zoe Quinn in the discussion (which ignores, in my opinion, that at the time the discussion was still more about gaming journlism than Zoe Quinn herself.
Simultaneously, Zoe Quinn made the poor choice to issue several baseless DMCA copyright takedowns against people criticizing her and the situation, triggering a full-on case of the
Streisand Effect. The most well-known example of this is was a video which she tried to have taken down because it "used a screenshot from her game" - the screenshot in question being an image of the game's publicly viewable web page.
People, of course, reacted rather poorly to this. This is when the "Us vs Them" narrative began to sink in, and the discussion slipped from "let's have a talk about issues of corruption in gaming journalism" to "OMG Gamers/4chan/ZQuinn/Tumblr [Pick One] are the devil!" Of course the loudest (and nastiest) voices got the most coverage, which only reinforced the Us-vs-Them narrative. By the time Sarkessian made the stepped into the fray, it was long since past the point for a wide-scale coherent discussion. I'm not sure why people latched on to her amid dozens of others saying similar things.