There was a big shift to the left around the time of the 2008 election. Part of this is that Something Awful has something called "toxxing" where you can make a bet and if you fail that bet you get your account banned. Given that it costs $10 to get unbanned this is a big deal. A lot of conservatives toxxed for a McCain win in 2008, they all got banned. Apparently there were also a ton of Trump supporters on the site in 2016, according to the goons that are still there at least. idk, I'd left SA by the time 2016 rolled around. I think all those Trumpers either got banned or left since then.
Toxxing for McCaine was just final nail in the coffin for a lot of posters. One of the admins was hard-core openly pro-Obama and over moderated anyone who wasn't dick riding Obama, and let anyone pro-Obama get away with murder.
So when the Toxxers got banned, hardly any of them bothered coming back. Since as you mention:
Something Awful is a pretty textbook case of a troon moderation team takeover. It's yet another community ruled by thin skinned troon mods who will ban anyone who damages their hugbox. And this damage doesn't necessarily have to do with anything relating to trans issues. So everyone who still posts on the site walks on eggshells so as to not break the strict but inconsistently enforced rules that the troon mods made up. In fact SA was ahead of the curve on trans stuff. They actually invented the word "troon" to mean trans goon, being that Something Awful users call themselves goons. My first encounter with trans issues was a thread made by a troon in the late 2000s.
The forums were already culture shifting due to cat-ladies taking over the modship reigns. Ozma (fat) and Eggplant Wizard (real name Elanor Jefferson who worked in the classics department of Rutgers University and wrote werewolf and incest fiction for Amazon under the pen name Kali Lowe) lead the charge to protecting fags, queers and Troons, and basically prevented anyone right of Mao from getting onto the mod team.
They also cemented in place the precedent of Mods going after anything or any poster who was popular and they didn't particularly like.
Previously SA had a huge diversity in members so you had threads about people doing long haul trucking, or had served in the French Foreign Legion, or liked to put on rubber tails and be mermaids.
This is where the Troons got their toehold with a "I'm a Tranny" threads. Mods protected the posters by banning people low-effort trolling the man in the dress, and shit only got more restrictive from there.
Goon is a term for Something Awful posters, IIRC because one forum owner being invaded wrote an email to Lowtax complaining about him sending "his goons". This morphed into gay posters calling themselve Fagoons, and the trannies thus became Troons.
The final nail in the coffin of SA's former edginess was when they banned FYAD in early 2020. FYAD or (Fuck You And Die) was the comparatively unmoderated forum full of edgelords. They got banned because a troon in another forum made a post about getting erections is womens bathrooms and FYAD mocked them for it. Lowtax claimed that FYAD was a forum full of Nazis and a bunch of regular posters were permabanned (cannot get your account back, will be banned even if you make an alt) stupidpol breaks it down here
https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/ej64zs/lets_talk_about_former_internet_sensation/
FYAD were a bunch of tards, but they had an external moderation-free space to call out the rest of the forums when mods/admins were doing shit, because it couldn't/wouldn't be banned, deleted, or otherwise memory holed.
Lowtax had wanted to ban FYAD for at least a year, and probably longer, because they called him out on his bullshit. And if anything an addict hates, its being called to task for what they are doing to themselves and others. The sobbing troon more or less just gave Lowtax an excuse.
The big influx of the left at SA primarily happened during the screen-shot LP of Super Dagan Ronpa (or whatever it is). Back before it was translated the only way to really find out what was going on in the game if you played it was that LP thread on SA and a lot of Tumblr liked the game. So they put the paywall up on games to make em join, (there was a retsuepre video making fun of them reeein' about it too, dunno if that still exists) they did but mostly they all just piggybacked on a handfull of accounts til they got banned.
Thing was, niggas really liked SDR and wanted to read about it, so lots and lots of them did register finally. They brought their politics and sensibilities too, which are pretty much what you expect out of twitter leftist now and started getting the ear of the catlady mods (Ice Queen, Ozma {lol fat})and people adjacent to them who had already dulled the edges of the site in like the 04'-08' time. They were the ones that banned the usage of "faggot" and "nigger" *unless you were funny about it, and that was up to the mods sense of humor.
The tumblr influx just sped up what was already happening. That was the cancer of terminally online, thin-skinned and low IQ faggots metastasized.