Republicans slamming her day-in and day-out made her a household name.
Like, AOC should be, (with no disrespect) basically a nobody in politics, she is a 1.2 term representative. But republicans wanted a villain and boy did they make one.
Beyond that, I kinda also think a critical bit in this is to understand that the headlines are not realistically a way to judge the actions of a politician because the politician is not the one actually writing them. Her job is to do her job and feed the marketing team the needed clips within. For the most part her daily life is reading memos and bills and voting. The PR team works like a marketing organization and they want to win in the same way AMD and Intel want to win, it's that simple. Hit the right notes while doing your job of working on the busywork of the job. It's mostly how Trump won 2016. Politics is marketing-based, not results-based.