It works well on college campuses and the internet when targeted at individuals. It doesn't work against anything else.
The type of articles which try to group and target blame at "gamers" are exactly this type of thinking: they're written on the assumption that "gamers" is a small group that can be shamed into going away. It's telling that they're written with the usual "can't get laid" smarm which fundamentally fails to understand modern demographics, and has a lot to answer for about how exactly one wants to help guide and shape a generation moving into adolescence who'll be wrestling with understanding a lot of these types of issues.
Conversely, they're not entirely wrong in this assumption if you consider the actual demographic audience either: the group of people who know or care about the blogs and personalities involved is tiny if you're not in it. It is not mainstream news. No one outside of the relevant forum communities knew or cared.
If you really care about corruption in games journalism (and I do) then it makes no sense to continue rallying behind this banner that was tainted from the start.
No it was not. Again, where are people getting this bizarre idea? It was created by Adam Baldwin, on twitter, specifically about games journalism and the game websites silencing discussion of games journalism. It seems really hard to believe that these constant claims that #gamergate was started to attack someone (who?) is all honest ignorance rather than deliberate dishonesty.