>I would expect a figurative war for human attention. With so much information being available, everyone would try to make people focus on what they want to communicate.

How does this relate to online commenting? Are you expecting the "figurative war for human attention" to make comments more diverse?

>Some of these tropes and arguments aren't really the best. There's a lot of rhetorical gotchas, e.g. "that's exactly what I'd expect from a human" when an automated solution isn't up to par.

I think you're overestimating the epistemic rigor of the average internet commenter, eternal September, etc.

>The only real "side" is the one actively pushing for something

Are you implying the "astroturfing" is only on one side? If you might just be experiencing motivated reasoning and/or confirmation bias. Most of the astroturfing behavior can be applied to the anti-AI side as well, eg. people complaining about electricity or water consumption in every thread about the impacts of AI, or "ai slop".