[tannhaeuser]

I've only been a contributor on SO for the last 1.5 years or so (though a long-time lurker since almost the beginning) and can tell you that it's not that easy or outright impossible to reach that kind of figures nowadays. Not that I care that much about my SO rep but still. Folks would often not even respond to long answers, use throw-away accounts, and the quality of questions is depressingly low, like in "How would I go about (description of a multi-year web project)?" without even the slightest effort of basic research or checking already answered questions. And of course the frequent case where students want to crowd-source their homework (sometimes answered by others who want to quickly grow their rep).

Was it always like that, or is it a recent phenomemon with more Web freshman coming to the scene since around 2012?

[shalmanese]

All the easy questions have already been answered so most new questions are obscure, poorly formed or duplicates.

[carlmr]

And obscure, poorly formed duplicates don't yield much long term rewards. As it should be, but it still means that these numbers are out of reach. Except maybe if you manage to work in the hipster shop that only uses the new technologies before they become cool. Then you can go back to answering the basic questions.