what that actually reveals, and explains one of the authors questions, why most things at all still work despite this, is that the particularities of statements

what that actually reveals, and explains one of the authors questions, why most things at all still work despite this, is that the particularities of statements don't matter much. If there's something useful in the made up quote that is why it's going to be proliferated, whether XY said it doesn't matter, there's not really any practical harm in that false attribution. This is also why crowdsourced predictions are remarkable accurate (and in fact often outperform experts, see Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner), despite most members of the crowd being wrong. As long as the wrong people aren't correlated in some way the average is a really good approximation. Most stuff being noise and only some stuff being signal is just how the world works in general, it's not even really an insight.