It's still possible, but from what I understand from the above statement, it was more possible and less stress-free back then, where most of the things you needed to do were just post whatever garbage that you could just to get the required activities, and you would be ranked with such a method before the merit system.

It was very easy to farm as many accounts as they could compared to the merit system in place, where you need to farm merit before you can succeed in farming accounts. No system is 100% accurate, but it's clear what the merit system has done.