4chan is kept alive not because of some looney conspiracy but because it's an extremely low maintenance site. Threads are automatically pruned and image and text limits prevent any thread from taking up too much space on the servers. The amount of content on 4chan at any given time is always guaranteed to be less than 1% that of a site like reddit. It also doesn't get anywhere near as much traffic as people think it does.

Hiro does some shady shit with the site, don't get me wrong, but it's less "4chan is a front for a government mind control program" and more, "4chan collects information to sell to porn companies without telling you".

Also, 8ch was a much bigger and much better strawman than 4chan. It had a much smaller userbase that said and did far worse things than 4chan, and was inaccessible via google, meaning normalfags couldn't look into it like they could 4chan. Why on earth would they eliminate such a perfect strawman in favor of a site that's biggest legacy is the large amount of weird porn it produces?

I'm not saying not to be distrustful. But you shouldn't have confidence in things you don't actually know that much about.