In regards to your question, yes things got bad, unfortunately what is hard to see from the outside, is that the vast majority of the harassment was originally done by outside third parties who just wanted to troll two groups. They harassed some people (mostly women) then said they were part of GamerGate. This wasn't even remotely true, and they admitted to this. Unfortunately the other side got caught up in the harassment and the claim that was done by GamerGate to ever actually think, "Why would this person who is harassing me (which is illegal) mention they were part of GamerGate (which was originally about Games Media, and had literally nothing to do with women in tech)?"
Follow that up with lots of mudslinging on both sides, and neither side being that willing to 'dig-deep' into the facts, and you get a year long 'cyber-war' between two groups of people who probably have much more in common than they think.