My understanding is actually that it was ruined by artificial fertilizer and monoculture, because those nutrients are drawn from the soil, and we only "feed" plants the nutrients required to grow and no other trace minerals. Eventually the soil becomes depleted and this causes them to be less nutritious.

Taste is affected similarly because we essentially chemically treat plants to make them take on more water and water them heavily to grow larger in size. Nearly every fruit and vegetable in the store is larger than it would be if left to grow wild, but they are more watery and less concentrated in flavor as well.

Yup this is exactly it. I don't think the issue is that our fruit is larger, but just that the soil is much more degraded. 90-95% of all plant species get the MAJORITY of their nutrients from mycorrhizal associations and some, like many orchids, are even obligate. Plant roots are generally primarily meant for communication and connection with fungi, not to extract nutrients from soil.

But when practicing monoculture, the #1 threat is pests and so we do everything we can to fight them. This includes using sterilized soils, an overreliance on pesticides, and the usage of artificial fertilizers. The artificial fertilizers are a particularly big problem when it comes to phosphorous because for most plants they rely on the depletion of locally available phosphorus before they start the complex chemical dance necessary to make the association with fungi

The really sad thing is that soil inoculated with fungi can hold 50-100x more water than sterilized soil. Without it water tends to drain and we use much more of it. Combine that with the fact that most of the phosphorus in artificial fertilizers is not actually accessible so we end up using more water which carries this leftover fertilizer which causes massive cyanobacterial/algal blooms that have already led to the extinction of many fish species.

It's a race to the bottom all to maintain the practice of monoculture. The research on mycorrhizae is relatively recent (mostly in the past 3 decades), but at this point the existing evidence is astoundingly clear. Plants with mycorrhizal associations better resist drought, frost, soil pathogens, produce more nutritious fruit, and can even produce more fruit mass (depending on the species, some will end up producing more leaves instead but this can be inverted with some manual labor)

If I understand correctly this is why aquaponics delivers more nutritious and better tasting veggies, along with less fighting against pests(?)

Why don't you enhance your understanding by, for example, reading the article?

Soil depletion is mentioned, among other things. But it isn't so much a deficiency of nutrients as a disruption of the uptake of those nutrients.

Water is only mentioned in the context of less water being drawn into the plants.

It's left to the reader to guess what you mean by "chemically treat plants[...]" but FWIW the main culprit is selective breeding, not any chemical intervention.

The vast majority of changes in plant genetics are from selective breeding, nothing to do with GMO.

Selective breeding is a form of genetic modification which doesn't involve the addition of foreign DNA.

"GMO" refers exclusively to organisms that have had genes added, edited, or removed directly, it has nothing to do with plant breeding.

Very few foods are genetically modified and those modifications have nothing to do with taste or nutrition, but pest and pest control resistance.

Foods have been bred for shelf stability and size which leads to less flavor and nutrition.

Traditional breeding may have reduced the nutritional content of plants, but GM can be used to produce plants that are nutritious and high yielding.

One study took wild tomatoes and used GM to increase yield:

"Compared with the wild parent, our engineered lines have a threefold increase in fruit size and a tenfold increase in fruit number. Notably, fruit lycopene accumulation is improved by 500% compared with the widely cultivated S. lycopersicum."

https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4272

Such things are not in the food supply. No doubt it is possible, and there has been research, but there are exactly 0 available GMO tomatoes available to buy as food in the US.

Perhaps it's just a matter of time.

Here's a good overview of the technology:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211207-the-tomatoes-at-...

I would be quite fine if it were.

But a certain kind of person (such as the first commenter in this thread I was responding to) believes most of their food if it doesn't have an adjective ("organic" maybe?) is a genetically modified organism, and everything bad about food is attributed to genetic engineering, this is quite false and a result of people who don't know much sharing disinformation with each other.