Passive trading is the only way to beat other players with more resources and information than you. As soon as you become a market-identifiable active trader, your behavior will be monitored and reverse-engineered. More power to retail investors to play along with the big players, and increased media hype --driven by vacuous memes and unclear-value-adding cryptotech-- giving more interest, only will unfavorably balance towards to the bigger players.
I think the resurgance of retail stock trading in the last 2 years or so, is not due to the uncertain economy (again, only big players really benefit from market uncertainty), but because there really were few other places to put your money (negative interests rates, high gold prices, impossible real estate market) and the Fed printing money and keeping the market from collapsing, led to a fairly certain economy, where the Fed would garantuee your losses, but you could keep the wins. This top-down manipulation was obvious enough to trickle down to retail investors using RobinHood.
In smaller, emerging, markets, quantitative active trading has become very competitive. Some markets, still profitable to active trading, are now beaten by a "mindless" passive trading strategy. Like stocks, it makes little sense anymore.
Wallstreet bets is a non-regulated pump-and-dump group, in the upper echelons ethically worse than the owners of the biggest hedge funds (who won't take profit on some plays if they know it causes long-term damage to the economy, the economy being a matter of national security). The GameSpot play made a few of those a millionaire, lost the college funds of people too late to jump on the bandwagon, and done damage to the degree of billions, when hedge - and pension funds had to withdraw from solid businesses such as Google and Amazon, to cover the losses from this memetic war. You can also state that the drivers of the bandwagon, were doing a passive strategy spanning years. It is the active trading of the bandwagon that made their strategy worthwhile (and not a poorly-informed play based on nostalgia and potential).
Numerai also is a passive investing (3 weeks+) fund. They are not that different from a hedge fund buying prop data.
I do think the article is interesting, and adds information on a new emerging trend. But it also reads a bit too kind and objective, like a music journalist describing a new album she isn't a particularly personal fan of. Subtleties will be missed, while the overal picture still is objective and correct to the quality.
As an investor myself, both active and passive, I progressed the most when I learned how the game is played at the top level. Active meme traders should do well to investigate these top players, just like these top players are studying them. RobinHood's order book is fed to the top players. They stand to gain by promoting this active retail trend, and taking near-certified profit on top of these predictable low-information emotion-driven masses. Buy things like Tesla or social media technology, which you as a 20-year-old, see using in 10 years. That's the way to beat the 35 year old senior Goldman Sachs analyst.