If you've read those books, do you not see that he was taking advantage of the way the world was changing in his time? That he was being quite creative in finding new opportunities to reach people?

That's the entire point here. That taking advantage of new opportunities in marketing is absolutely nothing new. It's what has always been done.

Since we're going down the road where you question my sincerity (seriously, does that ever work?), I'll also point out that you selectively quoted yourself. The second half of the sentence, which is still right there in your original post after all, very clearly has a tone that Mr. Bits'n'Bytes Growth Hacker is superior to the oldster Hoaxer who spread through "poorly fact-checked newspapers".

Come now, you have enough facility with language that you must know quite well what you were doing there.