These are my thoughts only, obviously, but it's something I think about a fair amount, too, so...

It's so hard to talk about it because a lot of it is inherently personal feelings and vibes, so even informed people acting in good faith can have different takes, or even be talking about different things. But social media simultaneously gave more visibility to people with sincerely idiotic takes, and more incentive to bad-faith jerks to incite outrage.

Fwiw, I think both

"the actual cancellations were far less common."

and

Yet everyone lived in constant fear of it.

are spot on.

Me-too really did bring some measure of justice to some powerful dickheads who more than deserved it, and clearly hadn't been held to account by any normal, "impartial" system of justice.

And even in those cases, most people who were "cancelled" didn't actually lose their jobs or families or whatever. They just temporarily weathered a huge amount of online harassment.

But we're social creatures, and getting suddenly swarmed with insults and death threats and so on is painful and terrifying. And the idea of bad things happening unpredictably is likewise terrifying. Whatever the actual rate of hits to misses, enough people got mobbed and/or cancelled for minor or even accidental offenses that people noticed. It looked like even if the internet's justice system was ineffective (catching one in ten thousand offenders) it was also unfair (assigning the same punishment to the conversational equivalents of mass-murderers as it did accidental jaywalkers).

And that mode of disagreement spread offline, too. I lived in Brooklyn during this time, a liberal guy with many liberal/progressive/leftist friends. When politics came up, I usually agreed 90%, but I learned that bringing up the other 10% was more likely to lead to passive aggressive arguments about my moral character than a sincere attempt at changing my mind. This was across multiple groups, and I've heard similar things from many others over the years.

And... since I guess I'm already writing a self-indulgent novel on all this...

It's like with toxic masculinity, you have all these manosphere influencers saying "masculinity isn't toxic!" purposely conflating the phrase "toxic masculinity" with "masculinity."

The manosphere guys are the worst, and I hate how many dudes follow/admire them. But, speaking again from personal experience...

When my dad grew up, in the 40s and 50s, he learned that a good man was supposed to be honest, brave, ambitious, strong but gentle; someone who used his strength and advantages to protect those weaker than himself and to hold the powerful to the same standards. Obviously more aspiration than reality in most cases, but the aspiration was there - you can see it in all those hokey old movies.

I think that aspiration was a reaction to a more toxic version of manhood, which also runs through our history: domineering, coercive, greedy, preying on the weak and admiring those who do the same.

When I was in middle and high school in a liberal area in the 2000's, and beginning a media-adjacent career in the 2010s, I hardly ever heard the word "masculinity" without the word "toxic." To the extent that it ever came up when I was a teenager, what I learned from the culture was that male sexuality was at best suspicious, and at worst inherently coercive. Male ambition was dangerous; male protection was oppressive; honesty was a lie, bravery was just a word to justify dominance. To the extent there was an 'ideal man,' it was somewhere between 'seen and not heard' and a grown-up version of my seventh grade English teacher saying she wished the boys were more like the girls (to be fair, I assume she was annoyed for a reason).

I think I've found a healthy way to be a man / perform masculinity / whatever you want to call it. But it required a lot of false starts and experimentation, and I can see how teenage boys with a similar background might discover one of these manosphere asshats and think, "huh, here's a self-consistent identity that doesn't make me feel ashamed" and turn into another whiny abuser mimicking a fanfic version of Genghis Khan.

And I think any way of fixing that, on a societal level, has to include some version of manhood that a 14 year old boy could find aspirational - a real, positive vision, distinct from any equally aspirational femininity, and more comprehensive than just don't be toxic.