I agree with the spirit of most "stop being insane about Russia" posts but I do think by focusing on the sillier posts by the Internet Research Agency, which mostly served to dump fuel on the Boomer Facebook Fire, we've lost sight of some Actually Disturbing things Russia did do in the 2016 election:

-They organized and funded multiple live pro-Trump/anti-Hillary rallies (most recognizably a "Hillary for prison" parade) in the U.S. using unwitting American Trump supporters as event managers; this created a non-negligible amount of real-world "grassroots" Trump buzz

-They used their intelligence apparatuses to hack the DNC and strategically release emails, and obscured their involvement so the leak *appeared* to be perpetrated by an American whistleblower at the time. Those emails didn't contain *much* of interest or scandal, and didn't contain *anything* illegal--but they were released in a manner that gave an appearance of greater/deeper corruption than Democrats and the Clinton campaign were actually involved in; the fact that emails *were* leaked was a confusing, related-in-appearance-only addition to the HRC email server scandal, which served to give the American right wing media more "scandalous" material to harp on. Add to *that* the last-minute Comey drop of nothingburger Anthony Weiner/HRC emails and it made for a much larger "scandal" than was appropriate.
[A note here: I *do* appreciate the contents of the DNC hack that revealed that there was a coordinated campaign against Bernie's campaign within the DNC but we 1. already knew that, and 2. that fact was mostly being talked about on the more leftwards side of the left, whereas the right wing media focused just as much on Donna Brazile giving the Clinton campaign a list of debate questions which, come on, is grasping at straws compared to what the full scope of the scandal appeared to be at the time]

-They penetrated multiple states' election systems and we're still unclear as to the extent of what they did in there--but it's possible that with their access, they're half of the reason for so many voter roll discrepancies that meant Republican election officials got to take affadavit ballots from people and throw them in the trash

Republicans and the American far right are the foundation of Trumpism, but Russian disinfo and cyber-warfare operations provided some important logistical framework for a lot of their machinations!