Even with all the conspiracies around, some real and some bogus like shapeshiters, the moon landing happened. I believe what added fuel to the fire was a Russian cosmonaut commenting his skepticism using the lack of hi-tech computers and the Van Allen Radiation Belt.
Valid point about the moon walk in light of all the fabrications with our populist age. Many years ago my friend met Harry Hammond Hess (Admiral H.H. Hess, geologist extraodinary, a US Navy Admiral and war hero, a friend of Albert Einstein, and extraordinary professor emeritus at Princeton, also the man who decided what the astronauts would do at every step on the moon). Hal was well known in Newfoundland all because of the Bay of Islands Ophiolite.
My friend got to meet Hal and talk astrophysics and geology due to him being a World known geologist. He was one of a hundred who knew that Neil Armstrongs words when he first put his foot on the moon was Hal's words (one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind). Did they really go to the moon? you can bet your life they did, it is for real and the proof is in the 350 kg of moon rock they brought back in five of those missions. My friend has seen the geology of the basaltic gabbros brought back under the petrographical microscope on slides which he prepared himself, and how can he say the hypersthene (a type of orthopyroxene a Magnesio-Iron silicate) doesn't lie. Besides that when Ernst Deutche and the physics department at Memorial University were triangulating the telemetry and radio signals at the time, they were arriving from the moon, and we were not the only ones proving it. It was inconceivable for the Americans to attempt such a fraud when they were locked in a nasty corrupted war in Vietnam.