I have heard people here talking about how over it is it lately with all the slop flooding iwara over the past few years, drowning out other content... so it made me wonder, how worse off are we today compared to the past?
if we uploaded 5 years ago instead, would our numbers be any better compared to uploading today?

I used two videos to compare, one 5 years old, one recent, both targeting the same exact audience, same exact theme, comparable quality, both creators had low sub counts when they uploaded.
Here I mapped out the first two weeks of likes for both of them.
As you can see, the old video rocketed past the new video and attained more than twice as many likes during day 1, but after that it had quickly leveled off and in just 5 or so days both videos were gaining likes at similar pace. So the main difference is pretty much just in the first 2 days. And the difference is only about 2.3x boost.
I expected it would be like 5x or more, but it seems the cost of the aforementioned slop flood has lead to only about halving the analytical for the "good" content. That is still significant, but not nearly as devastating numbers as I thought they would be.