While I am certain there were people on both sides of that camp, I never saw a overwhelming outpour of people framing him as a victim. Most of what I read was people confused as heck, including myself.
What I did see is lots of people wondering how he lied to the board. Almost a week later and we still don't know how he lied to the board. We can all speculate away but there has been zero evidence of wrong doing, what else are we supposed to do? I guess we can just call him a sleaze-bag like you do.
There were way more people who framed the board, than Altman as someone who did bad. At least until Monday. There were a ton of hearsay why ousting Altman is bad, without any context and internal info. And many of them was written by PR people. For example, "the last time when this happened was with Steve Jobs 1985". This is clearly a statement which wants you to direct towards that Altman is the victim. When it's not even true, because it happens all the time, like with Emmanuel Faber at Danone.
It's also par for the course in these scenarios for the public story to be completely fabricated and have nothing to do with whatever thing actually pissed off the board, so we may never know what really happened
What I did see is lots of people wondering how he lied to the board. Almost a week later and we still don't know how he lied to the board. We can all speculate away but there has been zero evidence of wrong doing, what else are we supposed to do? I guess we can just call him a sleaze-bag like you do.