If it's not astroturfing, the people who are so vocal about it act in a way that's nearly indistinguishable from it. I keep looking for concrete examples of use cases that show it's better, and everything seems to point back to "everyone is talking about it" or anecdotal examples that don't even provide any details about the problem that Gemini did well on and that other models all failed at.
If I give you hundreds millions of dollars for just making a clone of something that exists (an LLM) and hype the shit out of it, how far would you go?
I would change the world™ and make it a better place®.