It could be that, but if I got the timeline right Noben trooned out before the plague of troons hit us. He was actually ahead of the curve in getting the chop before it was cool. And I'm not sure how much Dave Sr. actually interacted with Noben before his "fanbase" dissolved.
My theory is that Kraken got swept up on the first wave of the plague of trannies, the same that turned SomethingAwful from a cesspit to... an even worse cesspit. No one in particular groomed him, but he was socially isolated, already interesting brainwashing, and then got caught up on the movement. And it was a gradual thing, too.
An archive of his FA from July 2015 shows him with a male avatar and pronouns:
View attachment 3038609
He had a "genderfluid furs" tag on his profile but that was all.
By June 2017 he was already using a female avatar and trying to type like a 14-year old girl.
His twitter would probably be the most likely source of answers. Unfortunately, the wayback machine doesn't have any captures of his twitter that are older than 2019, and I'm not willing to scroll back 5+ years. Plus I'm pretty sure he deleted a lot of old tweets to begin with. Unless someone steps up with chat logs or some other evidence, we can only speculate.