I think it depends what metrics a person wants to go by; like, since late 2019 the WWE has definitely gone into overdrive with shifting towards "we don't really
do wrestling here, we just make money selling TV rights", plus the cartoonish supervillainy of the pandemic era roster cutting, and I can see people saying that makes things undoubtably worse.
However, I often think back to January 2005: after a brief year or so of coming back to watching WWE, January '05 was the month that made me tap out for good and realize the company would never be aimed at my tastes as a wrestling fan, leaving me as someone who just follows results and news and occasionally sees big cards like the Rumble or Wrestlemania if a friend invites me over or something. When I look back at some of what made me walk away, I see things like:
-Weekly shows opening with unspeakably long, boring, repetitive in-ring promos
-Weekly shows coming across like they're being booked on the fly, as said interminable opening promos usually led to an authority figure making matches for later in the show (including "TAG TEAM MATCHES, PLAYA!")
-Weekly shows containing a ton of rematches from the previous couple of weeks, serving no real purpose
-Scripted promos for most wrestlers that felt forced and, again, repetitive in both timbre and delivery
-Heel-dominated shows where the babyfaces were often made to look bad or weak (e.g. Triple H dominating Raw even after losing the title)
-A lot of the newer talent being brought in getting booked into shitty gimmicks or shittier angles, or getting pushed well before they were ready for the spot they were being thrust into (e.g. Orton was not ready to main event in 2004, then you look at debuts around then like Snitsky or Mordecai)
-Storylines that seemed strange, leading to people saying "just wait and see where it goes!", and then they'd, uh, go pretty much nowhere
-Pretending a lot of fan reactions were from "Bizarro Land"...seriously, that started at Summerslam 2004 in Toronto
Like, seriously, I got to the summer of 2004 and basically wanted to scream at the TV any time JR said that Raw would be main evented by Evolution facing some combination of Benoit, Jericho, Shelton, Maven, or one or two other babyfaces who might pop up now and then. It was the pits.
Still, I can see why some people would look back at 2004-2005 and say it was better then:
-The roster was still largely made up of wrestlers from the Monday Night War era, who fans had a lot of personal investment in and care for
-Some of those wrestlers were veterans who might've had a bit more ability/freedom to work around some of the restrictions of the "WWE style"
-The promotion wasn't yet just an IP content farm, so they still had to actually try to appeal to fans to get them to buy tickets
-They did eventually decide to put Cena and Batista over big; I wasn't a big fan of either of them, and the years that followed were not at all smooth sailing creatively, but at least they committed to
some kind of future, even if a lot of other talent just fell by the wayside (the whole "Lost Generation" thing)
Nevertheless, to me it feels like so much of what people say is driving them away from WWE has been going on for over
fifteen years, forget just the past two. I wonder how much of that feeling of "it's worse" comes from people just having it sink in how long this stuff has been going on, how much of it is a factor of Monday Night War era stars retiring more (and the ones still around getting pushed over any new blood), and how much might be people getting more exposure to alternative options for wrestling and realizing that WWE's style isn't the end all, be all.