Prior to being hijacked by this identity politics and intersectional shit, it was pretty much a bunch of hippies banging bongos in the street and smoking dope in tents. A lot of it is exactly as you say, of course, people pissed off at 'the system' when they should've been pissed off at themselves for, you know, taking out huge loans to get degrees in some nonsense field of study that rendered them pretty much unemployable. But some of them, in the early days, legitimately were targeting the banks with criticism. Which of course, we can't have that., yikes cool it with the antisemitism, etc. Shortly after all of that, the 'movement' got co-opted by black-bloc faggot types and it instantly became more violent and destructive. The hippies and tent people had somewhat formed a tenuous agreement with the NYPD. They'd clean up after themselves and stop obstructing roads and the police would let them keep their generators and tents and what-not. When the black-bloc assholes came around, this agreement was voided because they started breaking windows, fighting and setting shit on fire. The 'occupation' tent city became a den of absolute degeneracy overnight essentially and remained that way, surprisingly the NYPD gave them time to get their shit together but they didn't. People started breaking shit, fights and rapes occurred quite often, overdoses became a problem, people were shitting and pissing allover the place and everyone was stealing from eachother. Shortly after that the NYPD moved into Zucatti Park and took all the generators, knocked down tents and seized supplies.
The entire mood and tone of the 'occupation' changed essentially overnight when a bunch of black-bloc college kids rolled in. My theory is that it happened purposefully. They had to shut down all of the agitation over the banks and replace it with this retarded identity politics bullshit that would become useful for them to use as a bludgeon in the future. I'm not naive enough to claim that the genesis of this entire "movement" happened in 2010/2011, it's obviously been going on since LONG before that, but I think the modern "SJW" type's foundation can be found in 2011 and it largely sprouted from the Occupy Wall Street protests. The groundwork was obviously laid long before, and had taken hold on many university campuses, but I'd say that was the first real "deployment" of that measure. Also notice that the Anti-War Left mysteriously came up missing during the Obama years.
As of late though I believe the people who manifested these golems aren't finding them very useful anymore. They out-lived their usefulness and infact have now become a very inconvenient thorn in the side of their handlers, but now they're realizing that they can't control the Frankenstein they reanimated, and all of the optics from this shit are backfiring hilariously hard right in their faces.