That seems like a cliché happily championed by the malicious.

As recommended by the CIA: https://youtu.be/Ro7sIqpcspM

Vs. conspiracy theorists are happy to imagine an evil genius black op behind every village idiot?

Snowden proved that conspiracy theorists were right.

Broken clocks are occasionally right. Yet intelligent people never seem to use them to tell time...

He wasn't the only one.

What fraction of conspiracy theories have proven correct, at a Snowden-ish level?

My sense is that conspiracy theorists are essentially a cron job crying "Wolf!" every 60 seconds. The occasional real-world wolf does not justify paying any attention to the alarms. OTOH, it's a false dichotomy to believe that the false alarms prove the non-existence of wolves.

Or by competence… Why are we trusting that creating a large and corrupt company would somehow help anyone in EU?

If the past decade of my life has taught me anything, it's "attribute all malicious actions to malice." It's usually just a matter of direct vs. indirect malice. Meaning, are they directly benefiting from their malicious actions or are they just assholes who "do it for the lulz".

The malicious actions are just at the potential stage at the moment. Someone has the capability to mess with our buses by means of a remote software update.

Just like someone has the capability to do with virtually everything we have running software.

Results matter.