Forums were and are generally terrible. When you get a forum in a Google result, or for some topics where forums still are a major way to distribute information, usually you get a crowd of uninformed but confident people, paginated poorly, with a bunch of dead links. The worst is people who write or distribute code and use forum posts as a substitute for version control. That is still a thing in some niches.

I can't agree that forums is dramatically better. I know/remember the feeling when you opens thread in forum with title that you are interested in just to see 200+ pages of slowly ongoing flamewar and spam.

Why do you think forums died? It wasn't because everyone serendipitously decided to switch to a dramatically worse system.

When Twitter went crazy, there was a clear migration path 'Just use Mastodon'[1]. With Reddit shut down, there's no clear alternative for communities to migrate to.

You say forums are clearly superior? Are you volunteering to operate r/seattle (or whatever community you/I care about), and its 100-500,000 users as a phpbb board? I sure as hell ain't...

[1] I mean, there are problems with that migration path, but they are significantly smaller than migrating a large subreddit to a forum. Reddit, both pre- or post-enshittification is still the path of least resistance for running a community, which is why people who put in the time to run communities use it, over self-hosting. It wasn't 'dramatically worse' for the people that mattered.

Forums still rule for discourse content for some subjects. Some of them are basically grand-fathered in because Google will surface them and their communities started before Reddit. Guitar gear is one of those. There are still half a dozen forums that provide way better discourse than Reddit. I imagine a big part of that is because the users are an older age group.