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That Ease is determined in SM-2 by what grades you give your answer – is not a myth. That’s just how the algorithm works.
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That Ease is incorrectly or unfairly determined by SM-2 – is an opinion some hold. That opinion can often be found on one side of a fundamental disagreement about what Ease means and how it should be used – for instance, whether there is a naturally correct “equilibrium point” for Ease on any given card, or whether Ease is some sort of a value-judgement that a learner should always be allowed to recover from.
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So there are those that decided the unfair determination of Ease was a form of punishment being inflicted by SM-2, a so-called “Ease hell.”
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That led some to develop full-fledged methods to combat that unfairness by rendering the “unfair” parts of the algorithm ineffective. Like anything that circulates on the internet, those methods eventually became somewhat distorted.
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And that in turn led others to develop half-baked shortcuts to combat that unfairness or otherwise trick the algorithm into doing what they wanted. [An example is exactly what you said – 2-button grading alone doesn’t do anything to combat “Ease hell,” it gives in to it instead.]
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[If it’s not clear, I personally think that “Ease hell” is great term for marketing, but based on some flawed (albeit well-intentioned) ideas about what was good or bad about SM-2. I think that even the best and most thorough of the methods to fight back against “Ease hell” were a bit shortsighted and made learning less efficient for folks. But since they were still using spaced repetition, it was still fantastically more efficient than anything else! And then I think that everything after that was the uninformed (but still mostly well-intentioned) leading the uninformed.]