If she was "spewing standard lefty talking points", she wouldn't get anything even remotely like the amount of attention she's getting today. She'd be getting the same amount of attention as every other talking head "spewing standard lefty talking points".
It's like you don't know anything about TV and media.
She's young, pretty, scrappy, and most of all a visible minority, which makes for great TV. And DC is a town that lives and breathes the media. So she fights far outside her weight class. I guarantee that behind the scenes, the DNC would absolutely love to shut her up, or at least put a leash on her. But the DNC is lashed together with the media, so they have to play along.
A talent that allows her to easily eclipse even the most egregious mistakes she makes,
Yeah, you really don't know anything about the media.
We're still talking about Dan Quayle and "potatoe". AOC could crap her pantsuit on TV and it would get 5 minutes of coverage, 3 column inches in the NYT, and anytime somebody brought it up after that they would be called a racist.
Comparing AOC to Trump is pretty accurate, though. With Trump's victory quite a lot of people noticed that you don't have to be the old-school buttoned down politician anymore. Brash and combative are popular now. Personally, I find it refreshing as being lied to by a mountebank politician is more annoying than being lied to by a circus performer. What's funny to me is AOC and Trump are far more alike than different in their politics and backgrounds. I'd rather have a government full of Trumps and AOCs than the passel of lawyers we've got now.