Nah dude, from what I remember, DC fandoms before Zack Snyder joined the franchise were mostly pretty normal. People argued about casting or movies here and there, but it never felt this aggressively toxic all the time, not even when Heath Ledger being cast as the Joker was considered one of the most controversial casting decisions ever.
After Snyder, though, the discourse turned into nonstop tribal warfare because a portion of the fandom convinced themselves he’s some misunderstood genius even though the guy hasn’t made a genuinely great movie in years. Every conversation somehow becomes “Restore the Snyderverse” instead of actually discussing whether the movies themselves are even good anymore.
The guy had the opportunity to make a movie featuring two of the biggest superhero characters of all time together for the first time ever and somehow fumbled it harder than almost any superhero movie I’d seen at the time, only for it to get completely overshadowed a month later by a Marvel movie where Captain America and Iron Man were fighting at an airport and mind you, Batman and Superman are inarguably way bigger household names to the general public than those two. And you’re still saying James Gunn is the worst thing that happened to DC? Why? Because edgy fans convinced themselves that making everything overly grim, self-serious, and visually dark automatically equals “peak storytelling”? That's sad 😂
Like I said earlier, James Gunn was the worst thing that happened to DC