Marketing techniques, propaganda and low-level politics (promote your guys, blow up the other guys) are obviously vastly more efficient than old school rhetoric.
The things you mention are rhetoric, and are as “old-school” as anything else. Your comment smacks of a bizarre attitude that seems popular among programmers, that “marketing” is at once all-powerful, impossible to understand, and completely without merit.
I dunno, if you read, say, "Merchants of Attention" or some other history of marketing, you'd not find any mention of Aristotle, but a whole bunch of snake oil salesmen and cousins of Freud. Maybe "programmers" know something you don't.