It was somehow golden period of the forum and you could see literally technical and well made discussion rather than seeking bitcoin investment advice and other spam threads we came across daily now and the well written threads are buried under the piles of such garbage threads.
If we're going to talk about the golden period of spam&shitposting, then I'll agree with that - because that's the time when signature campaigns were managed with bots that just counted posts without quality checks - I'm surprised you don't remember that since you're a member of the beginning of 2016. People who say that it was better then than today obviously have completely different criteria for good and bad, if we talk about the conditions that prevail in the forum today.
I'm not saying that it's perfect today, far from it - but for all those who used the forum to use it for profit, today it's much harder or even impossible to do what they did 4-5 years ago.