I wholeheartedly agree with this analysis, and submit that those users condescendingly suggesting that it's we who've changed and not 4chan may never have actually experienced the kind of 4chan to which the parent refers. Things were, are, and presumably always will be done for "the lulz", but what those things are, at whom those things are targeted, and why those targets are chosen have changed
dramatically. A bright, prescriptive mockery [0] has given way to a sullen, threatening white-supremacism dressed up like the historiography of the fall of Rome, complete with a would-be-kingmaker priesthood who half-ironically wield meme magic to (successfully!) sway real-world events [1]. And this transition is important, because much of the internet's "culture" is created on 4chan, only making its way into the wider world once it's been sufficiently, uh, digested [2] by successively more "normie" intermediaries.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20221128150706/https://www.mondo...
[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/memes-4chan-...
[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-life-cycle-charts NB the presence of _digg_ in the lifecycle; 4chan has been accepted as the spawning-pool of memery for a long time
