I installed the official Reddit app and went on it to see what the old place was looking like now. My inbox was filled with spam. The “home feed” shows subs I never subscribed to. There are so many ads. Between the ads and the the extra subs in the feed, it’s hard to just scroll. I also noted a lot of spam in some of the subs. Maybe they are subs with no mods? I’m not sure what’s up with that.
I think this is an illusion and that the signal to noise ratio was bad since like mid 2020. You just notice it now that you’ve stepped away, but during the pandemic the popularity of reddit exploded (check the traffic graphs), and the quality took a steep nose dive.