Without power leveling too bad, I can tell you you are extremely accurate in your assessment of them. I was a bit close to these guys and the website as a whole many years ago. Nothing major, but enough to know if you were an intern you were a slave and had to kiss ass and worship the higher ups if you wanted any hope of being brought into their clique. Or fuck your way to the top like Hope did. That's how most new blood got promoted. All the new writers they hired like Micchy, Nick, Steve, and etc got hired because they were friends of Zac and the others on Twitter. They had open writing auditions and it just so happened all of them were a part of that clique prior to their applications. Same goes to the forum moderators who were also friends. They had their own little IRC chatroom back in the day to berate and make fun of people and shoot the shit. No idea if it's still around, I heard they had plans to make a discord awhile back.
Hope (Jacob) also did a huge expose on why Steven Universe was the best series ever and pushed it hard on ANN back in the late 2013s/2014s on ANN for the exact same reasons she gushes about Utena. But then, Hope is a fucking insane bitch who insists Ikuhara is a transwoman in denial and hopes he'll one day realize he's trans and embrace his troon self so she'll latch onto anything LGBTQAIPD+ related. I really can't stress enough how much of an insane bitch Hope is. I'm sure Lord Kat can back me up on this if he interacted with her to any extent at his time on TGWTG. I genuine think she has mental issues. Beyond the obvious ones, I mean.
Here's a good example to showcase the kind of mentality they have. They routinely insist they don't ban people for wrongthink, but that's only because they usually just put them on moderation instead. Which means all their posts have to be manually approved by a moderator before they show up in a topic. The trick is to just never approve their post. So they never get to post on the forums again and they get to still claim they never banned them: a double win for them and they get to keep that facade of neutrality.
I'll tell you straight up the only person there who's a decent person is Theron, and he he gets a lot of shit both onsite and off for his milquetoast and neutral opinions on things like fanservice, sexual content, and icky stuff. If I had to guess, they keep him around so they don't completely look like a joke website. They always give him the hugely popular shows like Sword Art Online, Cross Ange, and Rising of a Shield Hero which they know are huge and they can't outright shit on and he gives them decent to good scores because if anyone else on that site reviewed them they'd trash the hell out of them and pretty much lose any credibility they had in the anime community. Theron is the decoy while the rest of the staff talks complete shit on thier Twitters and blogs.
And yeah, they shit on YouTubers because they're pissed more people would rather watch Gigguk, Lost Pause, Digibrony Mother's Cuckment than their shitty blog articles. Which is why they resort to clickbait and shit like this Vic stuff. They've tried to diversity numerous times, each with spectacular failure. Their video streaming service failed, their webcomic failed, their attempt at their own YouTube channel failed. They just can't do it. Their upkeep is pretty small, and their writers get paid for shit so I wouldn't expect them to go out of business anytime soon though.
I forgot about their idiotic semi-autobiographical webcomic experiment.... ugh. But yeah, most of what they DO put on display is awkward at best and aggressively hostile at worst, so I can only imagine how bad it is BEHIND the scenes.
