I feel like there are a surprisingly large percentage of the population that just take most things at face value. It takes something painfully overt for someone to notice, and it’s usually only spotted on something trivial, like fifty thousand five star raving reviews for a beer coozie on amazon.
Astroturfing is real, and if you don’t think that a government would do it… Wow you have a lot of history to catch up on.
It’s weird watching 4k re releases of CG animated movies from the early 2000s. Some of them they re-rendered at 4k and you can see that major characters are high res, but all the background assets are not. Same with some early special effects in 4k. You can really see the rotoscoping and how some effects were done