Green Day did not make punk rock popular; they brought it to the masses. There's a big difference.

No, there's not. Those two statements mean the exact same thing. If something is already popular enough that your everyday person knows about it, then it's mainstream. Doesn't matter whether people listen to the artist or not, the fact remains that punk rock was a prominent movement in both the United States and the United Kingdom by the late 1970s/early 1980s. What Green Day did was help take pop punk mainstream, which I've already said several times before.

Green Day did not make punk rock popular. The brought it to the masses. As in, any fucking person in 1995 that listened to good music liked punk rock in one form another

What a completely bullshit and rockist assertion. The hipsters of 1995 that liked punk rock sure as fuck were not listening to Green Day. If anything, they'd be listening to Television, Joy Division, Talking Heads, or something way more intellectual and artsy than the watered-down pop songs that Green Day was writing. In fact, if you went back to 1995 and asked punks what they'd thought of Green Day, they'd tell you straight to your face that they were garbage and an affront to punk music. Now that the kids who grew up on Green Day and The Offspring while having no connection to punk are now adults with Internet connections, you see comments like yours and the OPs: ones that assert that people in the past actually thought Green Day was some vanguard of punk music.

It reached a whole new level of success and went beyond just those in the punk rock community.

Yes, because it was basically pop music with a little bit of punk attitudes. Even Green Day's most acclaimed album, Dookie, sounds way more like a pop rock album than it does a punk album. It was popular because it was easily-digestible and had lyrics that were inoffensive enough to have the biggest appeal possible. It doesn't change the fact that punk rock was popular worldwide before Green Day became popular. The whole Wikipedia article on punk rock, of which you quoted all of one sentence, does a pretty good job of explaining the history of the genre. I really recommend reading it instead of cherrypicking a single sentence from the opening summary and acting like that's all you have to do.

But I don't need a Wikipedia article to tell me the obvious.

Who needs facts when you have your own personal feelings that aren't supported by evidence, right?