This could be true. But I saw it in histories of not controversial pages also. Some people feel they own articles they contributed to. Wikipedia made a policy against this because it was a problem.[1]
> You notice they almost never actually link to the reverts they are complaining about.
I noticed they said it was years before nearly always if they said when. And to find revisions of forgotten date in Wikipedia required more time than most people would spend for a comment. And anecdotal evidence changed beliefs rarely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_content
It's absolutely fair that people aren't going to dig up old edits. At the same time, I'm not sure how relevant years-old anecdotal evidence is. It would be interesting to see some actual statistics on this; I guess the data is public, so it would be possible to do research on how often helpful edits are rejected.
unfortunately I was editing under my real name and I'd rather not dox myself so I can't link to the reverts. but the general area was in social choice / computational democracy. so if you scroll around the edit history of some of those pages maybe you'll get the picture?