Why did devs start caring when Anita Sarkeesian showed up?

Before her, whenever people complained (usually fringe right-wingers and Fox News), either nobody cared, or they doubled-down on the "controversial" content out of spite, while making fun of the whiners. We got classics like Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption, etc, that got bolder and bolder in spite of the complaints. One could say their complaints drove innovation.

Then boom, it's 2015, and Anita shows up out of nowhere and claims "Everything is racist, everything is sexist, everything is homophobic, and you have to point it all out." Granted, she became kind of a thing since 2009 with Feminist Frequency, but after her infamous declaration, almost immediately, the people who gave the finger to all the whiners started bending over to her and people like her, and the rest is history. The gaslighting, the shaming, the memory-holing, the altering history, the hypocrisy, the doxing, etc. My question is why? What was different about her? Did she know where all the bodies were buried or something? She accomplished in minutes what all the whiners pre-2010 spent decades failing to do.

Investment companies like Blackrock and consultant companies like Sweet Baby Inc were un-earthed only recently, but did they go that far back? Maybe not the companies themselves, but the people behind them? Did they infiltrate companies beforehand "Winter Soldier" style and start spreading their Hydra propaganda, while propping up women like Anita, Zoe Quinn, and others like them to preach their bs? Am I missing something? Or maybe she wasn't the single source, but the trigger ala Archduke Franz Ferdinand? Even then, you could almost pin-point when things turned noticeably bad with her quote. Before her it was just isolated cases, but after her it spread everywhere. I used to think it was Leftists freaking out over Trump that caused them to double-down, but she predates that by over a year.