tl;dr there's a non-unsubstantial # of people who learn a lot from geohot. I'd say about 3% of people here will be confused if you thought of him as less than a top technical expert across many comp sci fields.
And he did the geohot thing recently, way tl;dr: acted like there was a scandal being covered up by AMD around drivers that was causing them to "lose" to nVidia.
He then framed AMD not engaging with him on this topic as further covering-up and choosing to lose.
So if you're of a certain set of experiences, you see an anodyne quote from the CEO that would have been utterly unsurprising dating back to when ATI was still a company, and you'd read it as the CEO breezily admitting in public that geohot was right about how there was malfeasance, followed by a cover up, implying extreme dereliction of duty, because she either helped or didn't realize till now.
I'd argue this is partially due to stonk-ification of discussions, there was a vague, yet often communicated, sense there was something illegal happening. Idea was it was financial dereliction of duty to shareholders.
Like Matt Levine says, “everything is securities fraud”. Company gets hacked? Securities fraud because they failed to disclose the exact probability of this event in their SEC filings. Company’s latest product is a flop? Securities fraud because they failed to disclose the bad decisions leading to the flop. Etc, etc.