I see that as a bullshit copout for people that don't want to care about people. Some of the nicest people I know are neuro-divergent, they just need to put a little more effort into figuring out what effects their actions have.
Just because you lack empathy doesn't mean you don't, or can't, care about people. It just means you don't have an automatic, involuntary response to other people's emotions. You can still care about people and desire good outcomes for them and want your actions to be positive for other people.
Neuro-divergence that reduces, or eliminates the capacity for empathy makes that harder because you don't get that immediate feedback, you have to figure out if what you're doing has the desired effect in other ways. Which makes it harder, but not impossible. And definitely doesn't prevent you from wanting to do it in the first place.
If you don't care about other people, you're just an asshole. Stop blaming it on neuro-divergence.
There was a period of time when MeToo was at it's height that there was very little nuance in how people reacted to any abusive behavior. Probably related to a dam bursting releasing emotions that had been pent up with these things going unpunished, and mostly ignored, for so long. And you're right, during this time people who should have apologized and shown some sort of behavior that made us believe it was sincere should have been able to return to public life after a period in the wilderness instead of being treated the same (socially, obviously they didn't get the same legal treatment) as Weinstein and Cosby.
I don't think your theory is tinfoil hat territory at all. I think a majority of people could go either way in life, on a wide range of things. Most people don't really give anything a lot of thought, they just fall into patterns dictated by their environment. If someone in their formative years is exposed to something that tickles their sense of unfairness and that leads them into shittier areas of the Internet, a person that could have ended up a nice, normal, boring person can be turned into a piece of shit.