Thinks are much better now than in the past actually.
Yeah no. There are way too many bots, 100s of thousands of them, shitposting or spamming with promotions. Word on the street is that these bots get paid at least 1000$ per week for one ANN thread. And these are bots, no hardwork required.
Making it so lower-ranked members' posts don't bump threads would put these type of bump bots out of business. In addition, requiring a merit requirement for Junior would ensure that bots never make it past newbie status and thus can be nuked.
Also, since you're a staff member, do the staff actually have the time to manually verify thousands of accounts?
Probably not as it stands, but dedicated patrollers can be made to handle these. We have to deal with the bots anyway so better to nip them in the bud before they shit all over the forum with explosive diarrhoea. The users will be shadowbanned and go into a queue so they can post as normal anyway, their posts just won't show up until approved which probably wouldn't take that long to actually verify.