This is personal for me, because I'm just old enough to have been active and around for that weird time in Dubya years when it finally started to become permissible, even cool, to call oneself atheist in at least some parts of the United States, especially on college campuses like the one I went to.
I kept in contact with scores of people that I had close ties with from the early 2000s, but watching the followers of the "Four Horsemen," as well as the horsemen themselves (fuck Sam Harris in particular, the quack hack), lead their flock in an increasingly reactionary direction was disturbing. Dawkins in particular had many swans to wrestle, especially against even the slightest attempts to make the movement about anything in particular other than dunking on religious people and feeling smart about it.
I saw the "dunk on fundies" video makers become "dunk on feminists and SJWs" almost overnight, around the time the Gamergate reactionary movement began.
To summarize though, it freaks me out how many of my old New Atheist college contacts started calling themselves "culturally Christian" (which means lots of tradwife craving and authoritarian and colonial aspirations, minus the inconvenient deity part) and even started becoming subscribers to Jordan Peterson.
Wild ride, buckos. :agony-yehaw:
I was super into new atheism. As a kid who went to a fundamentalist Christian school where I had an Israeli convert for a social studies teacher it was honestly really cathartic to loudly and proudly proclaim "there is no god you losers!!!" Still identify as one today.
I specifically remember the part when I finally pushed back and starting questioning the movement on a personal level though: the Zeitgeist documentary. Specifically the popularization and online proliferation of said documentary. For those who haven't seen it: it was fairly prominent in new atheist circles and was a multipart documentary that was sort of a poor man's Joseph Campbell meets Adam Curtis flim flam that tried to provide a sort of 'monomyth' expination for the christian deity with its foundation coming from the cycle of the Sun, and also how this somehow led to the new world order and the 9/11 conspiracies.
Now Campbell has plenty of critics who have pointed out that he kind of stretches things and forces square pegs in round holes for his theories but I assure you he had nothing on the people behind Zeitgeist (one of my favorites is how they try to explain how Jesus and the virgin birth is basically the same story as other deities like Dionysus or Horus, lol). I remember specifically groaning in Bill Maher's religulous when he actually sites several things that I'm certain he actually got from it which are basically made up as far as I was able to tell.
All of this is to say: I was never really surprised when all the "skeptics" and enlightened atheists started following Peterson and his "feminine chaotic dragon" nonsense or Q anon or any of the other silly stuff because if you really followed the movement they were always getting primed and conditioned to do so.
I had a very similar journey to what you had.
I now believe that a lot of New Atheists got stuck "chasing the dragon" so to speak and wanted to dunk on other people that they felt were beneath them when they weren't getting the same high from dunking on creationists. That lazy sense of superiority and getting addicted to numerous "logical and rational" internet celebrities and parroting whatever they said lead them a bad way.
I think that's a really really insightful take to be honest. Its interesting because I specifically remember before I stopped watching TJ Kirk/Amazing Atheist he kinda admitted that exact thing in a video. To paraphrase: he got tired of dunking on creationists and lampooning them because, basically, they "won"...or at least as much as they could in the purely online space. You basically couldn't make an creationist argument anywhere online without getting completely blown up and it had a boring stale circle jerk...and thus a new target was needed.
Nothing ever goes as you expect. Expect nothing, and you will not be surprised. Expect nothing. Hope for nothing. Nothing.
Yeah, the modern iteration doesn't seem all that different from the way I remember them behaving in high school. Hopefully they've stopped listening to Tool so much.