I think you have touched on something here. As you mentioned as well, what ultimately frustrated the individual who posted IAMA, is not that the content was hastily put together or is even inaccurate, in fact it was very carefully crafted with the intention of being interesting. As such, infographics have become a viable medium that people like and share, and the sum of the message/information is easily shareable on blogs (which is why most on the web are long and skinny)...most people wouldn't grab an entire article to repost on their tumblr or whatever, but a whole graphic looks cool on their site. Like you mentioned, this is the simple formula, but in itself isn't malicious anymore than realizing that people like big photos and funny videos and link to controversial/inciteful headlines.
That said, these campaigns have been tremendously successful even using completely irrelevant topics to gain links back to sites for very important keywords, and the content is not showing them to be an authority in their niche, be it financial or insurance or travel or gambling...they have shown that they can attract attention very well, that they are VERY good at SEO, and that they can (some of the time at least) design decent looking content.
I do agree with the individual answering the IAMA that it is an example of the internet being broken, and I found myself wondering if/hoping that somehow Matt Cutts would have a dream that would allow him to teach the Google bots to crawl a .png file to determine if the content in the graphic was relevant to the term in the links (or hello, at least the freaking title?). I am a co-founder of a company that creates infographics along with written content as part of an overall social media strategy and we spend a great deal of time finding the balance for each client between content that has mass appeal and content that relates to their core customer base/readership. You have to bring in new people somehow, but as many people have learned, irrelevant content doesn't convert, which is why so many people either craft content with no intention of converting and simply say 'social media traffic doesn't convert' or rank sites to sell them to someone who knows how to monetize them down the road (assuming these SEO rankings hold up).
Finally though - if it builds a site's reputation for being a relevant resource for interesting and useful content that does do the job of educating, it is ok if it looks pretty and does it with chart junk no matter how many purists out there say they would rather just pop open the .csv