Agreed.

At some moment, there was a period when there were debates about NR on LW, simply because those were the times when people on LW were okay with discussing almost anything. And NR happened to be one of the many interesting topics to discuss.

The problem was, everyone else on this planet was completely ignoring NR at that moment. Starved for attention, NRs decided to focus their recruitment attempts on LW audience, and started associating themselves with LW on their personal blogs. After repeating this lie enough times, it started getting quoted by other people as a fact. (Such as on Breitbart now.)

The LW debates of NR were interesting at the beginning, but they soon became repetitive (and it was kinda impossible to decipher what specifically Moldbug is saying in his long texts, other than that "Cthulhu is always swimming left"). The few local NR fans decided to start their own collective blog.

The largest long-term impact is that one hardcore NR fan decided to stay on LW, despite repeated bans, and created an army of automated sockpuppets, downvoting comments of people he perceives hostile to the NR idea, plus any comments about himself or his actions here. (I expect this comment to have -10 karma soon, but whatever.)

Probably long before NR existed, LW had the "politics is the mindkiller" approach to politics. This didn't prevent us from having relatively friendly discussions of political topics once in a while. But the automated downvoting of every perceived enemy of NR had a chilling effect on such debates.