To be fair, the content quality on Lemmy has been about the same from what I've seen.
Bots all over the place, low-effort quips instead of discussions bubbling up, lots and LOTS of low-quality armchairing, personal attacks and flaming instead of actual discussion....etc
It was good for a month or so during the reddit 3rd party app purge, but quickly went downhill.
I think it's a bit of both. Content itself is pretty lacking tbh - and I say this as someone who hasn't exactly contributed any quality content, but I have definitely enjoyed the overall community, it reminds me a lot of reddit 10 years ago tbh.
Did you try some of the smaller instances? Big instances will inevitably face the same problems that Reddit has/had. A platform is as good as it's users, and you can only moderate up to a certain point untill it becomes straight up censorship. Sadly more people also means more trolls and shitposters.
But yeah it's still annoying and I fully agree with what you said.
God the quips became so popular and incessant it was really annoying. The comment used to be a good source of relevant information and there were some really funny people in there but now it seems to be drowned out by the same one liners or bots.
This is actually a feature of Lemmy. If you open Lemmy and sign into your account in the browser you can go to content settings and there's a box you can uncheck for show bot accounts. Be aware this is all bot accounts even helpful ones line automods and such and it will affect the bota that autopost from Reddit as well. You'll see a downturn in traffic. But I thought it was worth the trouble.
No, Hexbear for all its intensity is very specific and limited to how they act and disrupt. There's tons of reddit-esque comments on lemmy coming from all the sites that aren't from Hexbear or Lemmygrad users.