I am pretty sure that it was similar in 2016/2017, in the golden age of bounty hunting. Most of those projects are long gone, but the market back then was so irrational that even scams and shitty projects listed on exchanges at multiple x-es, so this created an illusion of "better times". But then again, it is probably true that less blatant scams existed back then and folks actually tried to accomplish something with their projects, now they just pull the rug without even trying.