Communities tend to end up with a memes allowed and strictly meme free version of the community once they grow to a certain size.

It splits the community and the meme version will tend to have 100x the users but that's ok imho. You'll find the meme free offshoot will have the same feel as the early smaller community and will be much better if the topic really does interest you.

Image posting should have never been added. This was called out from the get-go.

From the very start people warned that it would water down content and replace thoughtful discussion, and so it did.

It was great for engagement though, I guess.

Perhaps personal ai based filters that each user can train is an option. I know personally that there are topics or opinions that I just don't care to engage with or read and it would be lovely to be able to train my own filter to just censor all that out of my feeds. I currently use reddit user blocklist as a partial solution, but it's a rather crude tool.