A lot of the newbies were simply clueless, not necessarily lacking intelligence. Still, they were generating a sudden and huge influx of low quality "content" aka noise, lowering the ability of the [previous] userbase to find what it wanted, and that userbase got understandably pissed.

And eventually this was solved - some platforms died, some got moribund, but the ones that were able to ride on the new times thrived. And more importantly, the internet as a whole found ways to contain and sort that noise.

That's a lot like what's happening now, except that the agents are not a huge crowd of noobs - they're a handful of shitty people using LLMs and Stable Diffusion to do so.