It was also possible to get curated by humans instead of bots, whales even! People would actually read your posts and vote for them if they liked them. Lots of people would see it and upvote it if they liked it. There was real interaction. It was beautiful! I loved it so much. Then came the bidbots. Now the beauty is gone. It is replaced by greed.

I suspect a big reason bid bots are attractive is because other forms of curation are difficult. Even altruistic voting (e.g. no benefit expected, other than improved system health) is time consuming. Content is disorganized; tags are noisy, and there are no content standards.

The crowdsourced content discovery mechanism has been completely undermined and it could have been prevented.

By "crowdsourced content discovery mechanism" do you mean votes and trending? Votes and trending should reflect what the community believes are the most valuable contributions, but it's not an effective way to discover under-rewarded (or just undiscovered) content.

In my view, Steem has never had a "crowdsourced content discovery mechanism". The most effective mechanisms were (and still are) manual labor -- digging through feeds, following new users, establishing curation guilds. In the beginning, there were less posts (it was possible to read every single new post), they were higher quality on average, and time spent curating was subsidized by the excitement of it all. Now we need to scale.