alt Hacker NewsphpBB was quite nice, but you must remember that people used phpBB less and less over the years. Many phpBB style webforums are dead, and died before discourse etc... came about.
People's habits changed.
I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.
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The legal landscape has also changed. 20 years ago I helped run a web forum, but with today's legal landscape - DMCA in the US, various different laws in the EU and other countries - I would never do so. The amount of liability on the host for user-created content is far too high.
There's one or two still kicking around that I visit myself, but I'll admit I don't miss not having threaded conversations. Trying to follow a conversation with other people butting in with low effort shit posting is way harder with everything being linear.
I still use it for private and semi-private forums. The access controls make it much easier to stop drive-by spammers or at very least prevent anyone seeing their crap posts.
What, really, is the difference between phpBB and discourse (not discord) in the context of the discussion we're having here?
What really killed phpBB and that generation of boards was mostly the sketchy codebases they ran off.
The code was rife with vulnerabilities, so the boards needed constant patching (which was a non-trivial that sometimes killed the database). If you didn't patch on time, a script inevitably dropped by, exploited the software, dumped all credentials, and nuked the database.
Those old forums were not built with the adversarial nature of the 2010s internet in mind. Boards were dropping like flies a few years there. Most simply never recovered.