In their defense, it was pretty clear to me what they meant from the get-go and your replies seemed unnecessarily hostile.

I truly don't think I was being unnecessarily hostile, as I did assume they were astroturfing in a stealthy sort of way (as I described). For that matter, the fact that you're defending them makes me suspect that you too are astroturfing to protect them.

The onus is on the speaker/commentor to speak fully, if they want to be understood fully, so that assumptions are not made, and misunderstanding do not happen. Trust me, I learned about that recently myself here on Lemmy lol.

I stand by what I said.