ExtraPenguin

In mainland China, the BNFs of an actor's fandom have direct ties to the actor's promo team, and get instructions from them. There is evidence that the BNFs stirred up the fandom on instructions of the promo team. So yes, he had lots to do with it. I dug out some reportage – a lot of it was conducted over chat/forum posts, but here are some broad primers/reports/evidence:

Reddit recap with in-depth background on Chinese fan culture
Presentation with receipts (in Chinese)

tl;dr: I wouldn't have taken The Untamed up again anyway, but this means I won't take up any Xiao Zhan drama ever. No, you can't change my mind.