I feel like BitcoinTalk became some sort of "earning opportunity" over the years and now it's now just a bunch of people who are new to bitcoin and can barely form sentences in english. What happened?
I don't know if you had a chance to be here during 2016/17 or before, but for those who remember that time the forum has definitely changed for the better, at least in the sense that a large part of spammers, shitposters and scammers have been permanently deleted ( banned). However, I would not agree that there are no users who contribute to the forum and are not fluent in English (although it is not their mother tongue).
I think that the more Bitcoin gets covered by news posts, social-media, etc.. 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. 
First of all, bounty campaigns are not nearly as profitable as a few years ago, and everyone knows that the number of active forum users has significantly decreased, probably for that reason as well. The statistics say the following for last 24 hours :
Quote from: https://loyce.club/active/
Active users and top posters on Bitcointalk.org in the past 24 hours:
Administrator: 0 posts (0 users)
Global Moderator: 0 posts (0 users)
Staff: 13 posts (7 users)
VIP: 0 posts (0 users)
Donator: 2 posts (1 users)
Legendary: 925 posts (222 users)
Hero Member: 666 posts (172 users)
Sr. Member: 572 posts (175 users)
Full Member: 495 posts (174 users)
Member: 536 posts (159 users)
Jr. Member: 500 posts (174 users)
Newbie: 3101 posts (970 users)
Brand new: 1150 posts (437 users)
Copper Member: 207 posts (75 users)
Total: 8167 posts (2566 users)
Administrator: 0 posts (0 users)
Global Moderator: 0 posts (0 users)
Staff: 13 posts (7 users)
VIP: 0 posts (0 users)
Donator: 2 posts (1 users)
Legendary: 925 posts (222 users)
Hero Member: 666 posts (172 users)
Sr. Member: 572 posts (175 users)
Full Member: 495 posts (174 users)
Member: 536 posts (159 users)
Jr. Member: 500 posts (174 users)
Newbie: 3101 posts (970 users)
Brand new: 1150 posts (437 users)
Copper Member: 207 posts (75 users)
Total: 8167 posts (2566 users)
About 1400 brand new and newbie accounts are more than 50% active users, but I doubt they are unique users - account farming is still something people do - we see evidence of this every day.
I don't know if there are statistics for the period between 2015 and say 2018 for active users, but it seems to me personally that the total number was much higher than today.