If I recall correctly, most of the moonshine blindness was not due to improper distillation technique (i.e. not cutting your distillation head), but rather that methanol was often used to dilute ethyl alcohol.
The majority of methanol poisoning cases are where illegal spirits have been deliberately adulterated with industrial methanol (most likely with denatured alcohol, which is still 90%+ ethanol) to increase profits.
https://www.vox.com/2014/8/8/5975605/alcohol-prohibition-poi...
The gov't still "poisons" alcohol today. It's called "denatured" alcohol and there are a bunch of "poisons" added like diesel, methanol, Bitrex, etc.
It's done because the gov't wants their alcohol tax.
Methanol, on the other hand, is not just more toxic but also reportedly tastes better than than ethanol. As such it encourages people to drink it. Using it to punish illicit alcohol drinkers is just plain evil.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatured_alcohol
And no, they didn’t used methanol to encourage people to drink it - that’s just silly.
Not everything is a conspiracy.