this is some wack shit.
I work with some of the smartest people in the world, PhD's in all sorts of arcane number theory and other wild stuff. Hell, I have a masters degree in EE with a focus on statistics. Throw in various people I interact with in my day to day life, my son's schools have had a lot of people with double digit employee numbers at Google/Facebook/etc...
The people being accused of running all these grand conspiracies are substantially dumber than the people I run with. And the people I run with know that even really smart people could not pull of the conspiracies being bandied about. I mean, Donald Trump Jr? Alex Jones? These guys can figure out the basics of grifting some really dumb people, but the conspiracies we here about are just nuts, impossible to pull off and even harder to hide.
I will say though, entirely plausible that when we say "what is Putin's end game here" - he's getting the exact end game he wants. Invading Ukraine - and making the invasion a clumsy protracted shit show - is perfect for pretty much causing chaos worldwide. If he wanted to "invade" the US, the simplest way would be to invade Ukraine, disrupt the oil markets, and then disrupt the grain markets, and let the blame game start in the west over inflation.