I'm on the other side of your words, I mean yes there will be a lot of Newly Demoted Newbies trying there best to get that merit point, and for that they will put some efforts to make a decent post/comment. And eventually, users who really tried to their best and really contributed to the forum will get that merit as well.
On contrary, The spammers who never tried to make good posts, just copy pasted or posted bounty/airdrop reports. They will still spam crap on the forum but when they realize there is no hope and just spamming and useless stuff won't give them those merit points.

So, it's just a temporary phase where we see an increase in desperate spam posts by those demoted members to get back to their previous rank. Eventually it will filter out just spammers who don't know how to post good posts, off the forum.