There was a point where the people in the cross section between smart enough to actually pull shit off but still dumb enough to do said dumb shit. It's not nostalgia, it's just the site's userbase has changed quite a bit. Like how the install Gentoo meme slowly disappeared from /g/ as population of the site actually became too stupid to install Gentoo. These are places that used to have full wikis people would regularly maintain to tell people about the board culture and common knowledge, the people who actually added to the feeling of community are gone.

The communities on the site are objectively shittier and less built than they were a decade ago. It was like a slower version of the Reddit burn. There's been a slow shift of these sorts of people to discord and other similar platforms that leaves 4chan a completely different community pretending to be the "original".