I think the most convincing case made about the sock puppets is around account creation dates, and also people disappearing after they get what they need. Like Jigar disappearing after Jia becomes maintainer. Or the guy "misoeater19" who creates his debian bug tracker account to say that his work is totally blocked on needing xz 5.6.1 to be in debian unstable.
https://www.mail-archive.com/xz-devel@tukaani.org/msg00556.h...
That was not necessary to gain trust. Writing style is different, too. Later when Jia gained commit access he reminds him to merge it.