Plus, recent political history and the kinds of benefits delivered by political actors suggest several things: hacking's taken on a special significance as wielded by state actors, there's a considerable amount of delegation to shall we say less expert practitioners who are only loosely controlled, and there's a great deal of effort put forth to deny ANYTHING of the sort ever goes on, ever ever.

To me all this seems par for the course. There's nothing unusual about any of it. It's what you would expect. It's basically like distributed stochastic terrorism, indirectly/loosely driven by a more capable state actor with specific intent to establish deniability.

Not even plausible deniability. Just some convenient way to say 'Nyet! And we are VERY OFFENDED that you would even suggest such a thing!'.

Just the fortunes of war, really.