It's been that way for a while before the Great Purge; at least a few years. This was a driver behind me unsubscribing from all of my subs and grouping them into multireddits instead and enjoying a blank front page.
On one hand you're correct. On the other hand: holy crap I thought all the "roast me" trends were dying down. I check back for one day and there's like 3 new variation of "AmITheAsshole" and "Roastme" each on the front page. Why?
It's both. I'd also done the same with multis but kept a "casuals" multi for the defaults + populars, and it had been declining in quality for a while - but it genuinely fell off a sharp cliff with the Great Purge, even my multireddits now feel like the frontpage. Cacophonous shallow dreck.