I feel like BitcoinTalk became some sort of "earning opportunity" over the years
On Reddit it is paid shills. On Twitter, Facebook it is paid bounty participants. You can see the similarity now?
and now it's now just a bunch of people who are new to bitcoin and can barely form sentences in english.
Language barriers might be present for such incidents to be present. I specially found certain country users English to be barely understandable or sometimes even give a wrong meaning. Not that you can help that, but guide them to post in their "Local" sections. Otherwise, just report the post as "Offtopic" and most of the times it gets acted upon by mods.
I think that the more Bitcoin gets covered by news posts, social-media, etc..
News sites are niche and they run mostly on the news already being posted on mainstream news or paid articles from crypto related businesses. I dont think comparing the forum to news sites is same. There is a marketplace area in this forum too where some people running businesses and a technical and mining related section.
The more people join the forum and spam bounty campaigns and seem to be spamming posts to earn merit which is something that you wouldn't see in the last years.
Spam posts will not earn merits. Because merit sources are handpicked by the admin, you can be sure of this.
More people joining the forum is a good thing - it shows bitcoin is being adopted globally - do you not want that?