every time someone pretends something old is new I die inside a little
modding is dead, that much is true, but it's not because people forgot how to mod or whatever you're trying to say, it's kind of the opposite
first off, it has always been the case that most people suck at modding. open any old map thread and you'll see mods that look exactly like the stuff you're getting today (or worse; just look at any old NC mod wall). this is neither a new thing nor something you can fix for as long as the game keeps growing, because new modders can't help but suck. modders sucking is not what killed modding.
what actually did it is a culture shift. think, for a moment, about what the game and community were like when people still cared about modding: maps needed 12 kudosu stars before they could be ranked, and nominators generally weren't willing to look at maps before they had been modded a few times. kudosu was also nowhere near as abundant as it is now, because you'd usually only make one comprehensive post per map. so, people had to get mods in order to get their maps ranked, and they had a strong incentive to mod other people's maps as well.
over time, though, safe maps by well-known mappers got ranked with fewer and fewer mods, which eventually went down to none at all. there was a bunch of drama about it, but the reasoning that "good maps don't need mods" was persuasive enough that it's the heart of the general attitude towards modding today. naturally, this started to happen with smaller-name mappers as well, and today, anyone can rank a map with no mods from non-BNs.
then, as the final nail in the coffin, the website redesign brought us the modding discussion system (mv2). star priority was replaced by the meaningless hype system we have now, removing any incentive for anyone to mod maps other than self-satisfaction or the prospect of becoming a BN. mv2 also got rid of all the formatting options people used to use to give their mods a personal flair, which soured the whole experience for a lot of people.
so, in short:
- there is little incentive to mod other people's maps
- there is no incentive to get mods on your maps
- modding on the site is fairly impersonal
the first problem could be fixed by going back to something akin to star priority, but not without pushback; the community is used to the irrelevant 5 hype threshold. the second one there's no acceptable fix for, while the third one could be somewhat alleviated by adding actual formatting options to mv2. I think the ship has kind of sailed for the issue in general, though, because the community has outgrown the website. most mapping discussion happens in discord servers and the like, not on the forums or mv2.