This might genuinely be schizophrenic-take-meds territory, but I feel as though the organizational and almost industrial way that every imageboard gets inundated with pedophiles and the menagerie of other nutcases is almost orchestrated to funnel traffic to 4chan.
In this day and age where it has been definitively proven that governmental and corporate entities do infact meddle? No, this isn't a schizo take in the least. While it's probable that at least some of it is done by independent entities, I can't believe that any given government
wouldn't weaponize things like child pornography against whatever opposition they deem fit.
Seeing as how most people and organizations will bend the knee at even a sneeze of having CP on their platforms or are indirectly supporting it without doing due diligence to see if it is actually true or not, CP makes a heinous but effective weapon to deplatform these image boards. The only reason 4chan is still around is to serve as a glorified fig leaf of the old days, and even that is slowly but surely being weaned away as the Internet is ever closer to being centralized into a three site only hellhole.
I myself was never there for the glory days of 4chan, but even going back to 2017 up to 2020, you could certainly tell it took a turn for the worst. As for the other imageboards, they never stood a chance. The days of imageboards, as echoed elsewhere in this thread, are long over. You cannot sustain something like that in the face of a massive institution that can swat away at anything with just a few glowies posting CP or whatever even something more innocuous to knock it off the net. Just take a look at how hard it is to maintain Kiwi Farms in the face of all this adversity. If it wasn't for Null's absolute absurd but glorious dedication to keeping this site online and the dedication of its userbase, it would have folded from the word go.
Alas, imageboards simply don't have this support by their very nature. They can't protect themselves from outside interference, and you can't coordinate as a community to guard against it as easily like so here. All it takes is one dope to post CP, and you're done.