Yeah, there are deffo other factors. Edgelord culture, kids raising themselves, school IT being stupider than the students, and so on. Like, my high school IT department blocked all the .com domains and only allowed .gov .edu and .org. That directly led to my entire class discovering 4chan at the same time and somebody hacked the projector to show anime tiddy during class.

But I really feel like the media influence can't be ignored. Like, a lot of antiheroes from that time period were edgelords, and I know a lot of my classmates saw them as role models.