It is my assertion that the Wikipedia project has existed for so long that its policies, guidelines, and enforcement have worked as a sort of 'selective pressure' to retain not so much the best and most dedicated editors, but instead to retain a number of sophisticated and unsophisticated bullies and bad-faith actors. They have learned to operate within the bounds of a bureaucratic system which is incapable of beginning to tackle the issue, and has decided the best response to this dynamic is not only to ignore it, but to actively defend the situation as it exists.
After an extended period of time working within Wikipedia to try and determine the extent to which this is the case – and indeed, prove my "hunch" wrong, since it's always easy to dismiss a system until you give it a shot yourself – my cynicism is reinforced. Even on fairly simple matters like stylization or non-contentious move requests, editors will use policy and guidelines as bludgeons for their preference in any one case, rather than actually read, interpret, and actually apply guidelines or policies.
Sources say what editors want to say. In one absurd case – and I limit myself to just the one not for lack of evidence, but simply for lack of time – an editor repeatedly insisted that a source did not say what it said it did, over and over and over, to justify their rationale to support a move request. This is a fairly lighthearted example, but there is no additional consideration or caution given for topics, regardless of the significance of the matter being discussed, edit being proposed, etc. There is no enforcement of logical consistency, no coherent guards against systemic bias, etc. Of particular concern, the project has become de facto dependent on difficult personalities who are unable and unwilling to work on building consensus with others – the people still left are the people who pushed everyone out. Even when a new editor attempts to disrupt the status quo with the best of intentions and work to rectify the situation, from the point of view of Wikipedia administrators, it's too risky – the current guy sucks, but he's our guy, and we know what he does and how he works, and he's done it for us for years. We don't know if the new guy will even still be around in two weeks.
Bludgeoning policy, gaming the system, outright harassing users – the system as it exists is incentivized to look away when senior editors engage in these behaviors, and it does look away when this happens. And so it is the senior editors who control the horizontal and the vertical, and in between their hundreds (often even thousands) of inconsequential edits – cleaning up comma splices and run on sentences, fixing the tags and templates of sources – they will every now and again rewrite reality. And this reality shows up on the front search page results of virtually every search engine today.
How consequential is this rewritten reality? It varies. Some of it is simple left reactionary over-correction to trademark systems ..consider who contributes to this Wikipedia – who can really be surprised that a project that has to have an explicit policy to tell its editors to stop including xkcd in every single article where it's even peripherally relevant would turn out to be "leftypol Linux nerds". Of course they'll make bad-faith arguments against observing conventionally observed trademark stylizations.. some of it is neoliberal garbage, some of it is up to and arguably including genocide denial.
What are you to do about this?
Consider the old, trite observation "Wikipedia is a bureaucracy". Sure. Always was, but that's not an immediately insightful observation. It doesn't mean anything in and of itself, but the immediate second-order consequence does: Wikipedia is comprised of bureaucrats. Bureaucrats do not respond to criticism from within, because they can always suppress, diffuse that criticism, or even redirect it to becoming a criticism of something else entirely that what was intended by the original criticism – the argument is reframed to their benefit, to get rid of things they always wanted to get rid of anyways. The 'complaint box' as set up in any bureaucracy does not empower you to fight bureaucrats, it only gives them ammunition for the war they were always going to fight anyways.
However, Wikipedia cannot control criticism that comes from outside of itself. SNS like Youtube, Twitter, etc. and the advent and maturing of LLMs such as ChatGPT, etc. provide effective alternatives to the reality these bureaucrats have written for themselves. When you find yourself, out of habit, checking this site – check the talk page when you see something that doesn't make sense. See what completely nonsensical rationale is provided for reasons for edits. Grammar is argued with to allow for some syntactically ambiguous statement – these people aren't stupid. They can't rewrite reality, but they can blur the parts they don't like a bit. And so on.
Make note of these things. Observe it each time. Over and over. Learn not to trust this project, learn not to take its claims at face value. Join in on those old arguments that never quite made sense – who cares, the ends justify the means. This is a project with contempt for you. You should repay the favor in kind – and be eager to give back a little more.