There were always low-effort articles where some journalist would rip off another paper without really looking into sources, and sometimes that original article would just be citing a forum post or something. A couple games of telephone later, and you get outlandish claims not backed up by anything at all, and it all happens when journalists rewrite things in their own words.

What seems to have happened is that those low-effort articles have exploded in number and have gotten better at SEO, to the point where the higher quality content gets buried by SEO spam. It certainly doesn't help when sites like Reddit give it more credibility by users linking to them, and it's easier than ever to pay someone (or configure AI) to generate these articles en-masse.

Those high quality sources still remain, they just don't show up in searches. Go ahead and read Reuters, New York Times, The Economist, etc. They mostly still exist, and they're still high quality. But their headlines aren't as evocative, so they don't get passed around social media (where people rarely read past the headline anyway) as much.

In the past, we called low-effort, sketchy sources "tabloids," now we just call them "news" and reserve the term "tabloid" for the crazier stuff that makes it to store checkout lines.