Star forts existing despite their expensive construction because they are superior to other fort designs in the age of gunpowder due to their overlapping zones of fire and safe zones for defenders? No! Clearly its because we have aquatic ancestors with melon glands and long skulls that bread us into slaves by removing said melon glands! And we hid their skulls there! In some of the most interesting and eye catching structures to see! You know, to not draw attention to them!
I'm never not going to post this glorious video from Folding Ideas about Flat Earthers. It's a tranquil and thoughtful examination of the evidence of Earth's curvature in act one that is actually very beautifully done. The second act is about how people get pulled into these ways of thinking and how it never has anything to do with a logical position.
People do not have reasonable, rational brains. They have brains designed to explain your feelings. Whenever you feel something, physical or emotional, your brain writes a story to figure out how it happened. Sometimes the stories make sense because we can connect events in a logical way. When emotional states become disordered or compromised the brain can become very lost and it will start pulling together more and more stories to explain a feeling that just won't go away. This is how people get attached to conspiracy theories and ideas that the universe is not what it seems. This is why otherwise smart people like doctors and nurses can become anti-vaxxers or how some scientists flip to climate change denial or other radical beliefs.
We are not a rational or logical species, we are a species that tell stories because we are overflowing with feelings.
Especially since star forts are such a recent development. They are not some mysterious ancient ruins, we literally still have the blueprints from the people planning them.
It's a practice that's potentially older than our species and nearly as wide-ranging. I think there were several Mesoamerican cultures that performed it. Such things were occasionally practiced in western Europe as late as the early 1900s.
I mean it literally has to be, the whole point of uncovering some conspiracy is to find evidence that the world is not what it seems, this allows one to embrace the stories their brains write to explain why they're constantly anxious, depressed, hopeless or scared. Conspiracism is a response to emotional states, and in fact most of our beliefs and experience of the world is guided by our emotional states, it's just that most of the time we can connect together narratives that we can all agree on. Sometimes people split off and decide to start agreeing on new things because they think some hidden truth is the real reason why they're miserable.