I was a tiny tiny competitor to eBay some 20 years ago and the pez story was pure BS.

The reality is that eBay (that is AuctionWeb) got its initial traction from spamming Usenet as the story correctly states.

Very quickly they moved from spamming themselves to letting their users spam Usenet.

This is the "growth hacking" model still followed today by many. The question is there any moral middle ground?

If you can search Usenet archives you can find remnants of that AuctionWeb spam and people complaining. Soon others tried to copy them but it was too late.

This was in mid 90s after the first mass spam from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie... .