That is true. The initial wave was driven by the sheer excitement of being able to “publish”. I do think that the ad supported model is still responsible for what happened next. Ads encourage optimizing for eyeballs and traffic vs quality. And that’s exactly what happened. The good stuff was buried by the ad optimized garbage everyone is complaining about.

Btw, I’m not dogmatically against ads. I believe they serve a purpose and are necessary. Just pointing out the side effects.