Whatever your ideology or leanings, take off the tinfoil hat. The argument advanced in the Lancet article is supported by high quality data. If you can't construct a coherent, evidence based counter-argument, then you don't have a point. I don't know what else to tell you.
I honestly to this day have no idea how HCQ was advanced into the public sphere or why, but in our early frenzy to do anything for the really sick COVID patients it ended up being fairly widely used (among a lot of other drugs). So far the only one that has shown some benefit is Remdisivir, which demonstrated accelerated recovery times in hospitalized patients (but no mortality benefit). Not exactly a magic bullet. HCQ at this point has been pretty repeatedly shown to not work and has a concerning potential to cause dysrhythmias.
You are correct in that it's become a massive clusterfuck. You know, typically, people don't have much interest in the wonky and dry world of clinical drug trials. Now, suddenly, this is a topic that everyone and their mother has an opinion on (as demonstrated repeatedly in this thread). It's really fucking frustrating. Media articles misrepresent findings in published literature and suddenly everyone is an expert with emotional investment in being right. However, most people also lack not only the ability to read and understand primary medical research, but also how to put it into greater context.
Here's the deal. Drugs don't work just because you want them to. Even if they work, they often don't work very well. In fact, just my opinion, but I doubt we'll actually develop a very good specific antiviral therapy for COVID-19. Viruses are very hard to target with drugs, and those drugs are often highly imperfect. For example, the only specific anti-viral we have for influenza - another respiratory pathogen that kills tens of thousands of Americans per year - is garbage. Tamiflu is generally better at giving you diarrhea than it is at treating the flu, and can cause really charming drug induced delirium. I have no reason to think we're going to do better with COVID-19.
In my opinion the best we can hope for is an effective vaccine. This is a playbook that has worked well for our species in combatting this kind of disease. Generally speaking, if a bug is badass enough to cause severe multisystem organ dysfunction and land you in the ICU - whether it is a virus, bacteria, or otherwise - you're already in pretty rough shape. Bacterial sepsis is a leading cause of death in the United States, and bacteria are far easier to target and destroy with drugs than viruses. We don't even know where to start in trying to repuporse drugs for COVID-19. Wondering what else we can throw at you besides the kitchen sink is asking the wrong question.
It is a waste of time for the public to worry about what ID is going to recommend for COVID19 pharmacotherapy. Nobody seems to be giving the same amount of attention to whether or not to prophylactically anticoagulate these patients, which is an actual ongoing debate in the medical community... not HCQ, which is rapidly proving to be just as dumb of an idea as it was when it was first proposed.
Why HCQ was embraced early on by medical professionals - despite zero quality evidence to support its use - is a social phenomenon that I would love to read a book about one day. I truly can't think of anything else like it. It's frankly kind of embarrassing.