memes

Yeah, this is the best explanation for why this 'controvesy' happened.

Certain background lighting conditions and colors can significantly alter the color and luminance of certain objects in that lighting environment, which otherwise, in less extreme lighting environments, look different.

Even just understanding basic color theory can show you how to make a color pallette out of either mutually complimentary colors, or highly contrasting colors... and how humans largely, (though apparently to differing extents and by different means), interpret a total color space by comparing and contrasting the colors within that space to each other, as opposed to against some objective reference point of all possible colors.

The other part of this explanation is that...

People were not talking about the same image.

Someone would argue one way, another person argues another way, and then someone else would do some kind of photoshop job to argue for one side, and their explanation and reasoning and justification would get lost, and ok now you have multiple images spreading around and being argued over by the same population that would...

... in 5 years, essentially start a civil war over the idea of whether or not it makes sense to wear a mask during an epidemic of a virus transmitted in the aerosolized spittle from sneezes, coughs, and even just breathing.

But yeah, when this was an ongoing thing, I'd have multiple different people in different camps... sending me actually different images, and it took a while to figure out which one was the actual original origin image.

Which of course I had to do on my own, but critical thinking and basic research skills, an impulse to verify the base assumptions of a claim or argument... many people do not know how to do this, or only selectively do it with things that challenge their pre-existing notions.