I don't think 4chan is bad actually. It's not as good as it once was, but it's not horrible. /pol/ is whatever, but some of the smaller boards can be pretty enjoyable. I like posting on /o/ and /ck/ from time to time and occasionally check out other boards.
Someone complained about the post timer now. Unless you're always browsing incognito or resetting your IP daily, it's fine. You only have to wait 900 seconds once and then you're good until your IP resets. I do think that actually cut down on the spam a little bit.
Only real issue with 4chan is the lack of ability to post webms with sound. That single change could help it a lot.
But I kind of don't think it should change. I like that it's kind of a relic of the old internet. That being said, the main issue with 4chan is the main issue with the entire internet now. What used to be something mainly populated by nerdy men and young people is now populated by everyone. And on top of that, a lot of the more interesting and niche groups of people are no longer only publicly accessible forums (such as a kiwifarms etc) or imageboards or even aggregators (reddit). They're all on Discord and Instagram and other private walled-off social media platforms. What was once searchable is now hidden
I can sympathize with your perspective, but you are, sadly, wrong here. What was once 4chan is it no longer.
Long ago, 4chan, for all its problems, was a haven for actual discussion. Each board had their own little subcultures, their own memes, their own rivalries, and so on. None of that is the case now. The current people running the site do so with the specific intent of preventing discussions from happening of any kind - particularly politics, but pretty much anything that winds up going in a direction the mods don't like will quickly be banished to the shadow realm. It all is allowed to go one way, and it is designed to be part of the endless falsification of public opinion.
As is the case witrh all the most egregious shit this decade, your self-declared betters bargained everything good about the site away ages ago. Everything that used to hallmark the site has been either systemically dismantled or abandoned. The site tries to get you to dox yourself in an effort to bypass a post timer, like Something Awful was something to fucking emulate. The jannies are even bigger power-tripping fuckfaces than they
ever were in our time, and considering the caliber of some of the winners that existed in Moot's time that was kind of impressive.
The worst part of it is that, like the intentional demolition of Forums, this was intentional. It was an attempt to funnel online traffic onto big social media networks where it could be controlled. Smaller forums escaped this fate but all the big ones that used to be centerpieces online? Long since gone, and with nothing to replace them.
Fact is, everything you valued about that site has been absent from it for a very long time. Eventually something new will emerge, but god only knows what form it will take in the diseased online ecosystem we all collectively find ourselves in now.
