Yeah they've been circling the drain for a while. There are less and less places they can post without censorship and AI has made it worse.

When the old Gurochan first crashed and came back and crashed again over and over a lot of the artists never came back.

Several other sites and places have died as well like SirSnuffHorrid and other places, some of them had a bunch of links going to other places once upon a time but without those in between sites there was no way to find to other ones.

I know some artists have turned to AI or given up because of it. And all of the ones I can still find post less stuff less often and it's quite often not as polished as some of their older stuff.

If you want the old days back what you need is a site that is easy to find, easy to use, uncensored, and monetizable.
And I'm not sure that's possible anymore, not these days with the spreading demand to provide ID to log into sites and AI slop everywhere.