I would not say that people think so nowadays. They used to think this way, it's hard to argue with that, and this attitude towards the forum was clearly expressed and confirmed by the huge number of participants in useless bounty campaigns, whose posts littered the forum. The implementation of the merit system partially solved this problem, it became much more difficult for new accounts to climb the ranks to participate in normal campaigns, and useless bounties do not pay well enough to be massively attractive.
In general, with the rise in the price of bitcoin, paying in signature campaigns has become less tempting. Even many high rank accounts stopped seeing the point in this and left the forum. In addition, the forums themselves as platforms for communication are already dying off, people now interact much more in social networks. So those who are here now are either really fans of this format of discussions and seekers of like-minded people, or those who have not yet realised that there is practically no easy money left here.