Was World of Tanks really better before?

Hey yall! I want to spark up a discussion here about a topic that's seen much debates over the years, regarding the state of the game with 5 minute 15>5 roflstomps, powercreep, pay to win imbalanced premiums, goldspam, etc.

So I'd like to ask a question – was the game really better years ago?
I'd argue it wasn't, and here are some of my bulletpoints:

Here's some on the top of my head that I remember about the game (been playing since early 2012).

• Artillery was much more powerful. 2,000 alpha on a T92 with 350mm of AP pen. Getting oneshot in my T10 was not rare.
• Wow, a match with 12 artillery in our team, and the enemy have 10! Fun, balance!
• Look at my AP shell that penetrates but does no damage. What a fantastic feature in 2012 world of tanks.
• The incredible lack of penalty when TDs fire and their godlike view range so if you're a heavy on an open map and dare push you just get outspotted and die. What fun was that huh!
• A Maus fighting tier VIIs! Balons yes?)) Just look at the E25's unnerfed stats and the FCM tier III's view range! It's mind-bending.
• Failplatoons with an MS-1 in a tier X match on your team. So funny xd lol lmao. Yes?))
• Oh look, our team has 15 tier 8 vehicles, the enemy have 14 tier 8s and one tier X. Why the fuck not.
• Very slow update times for spotting vehicles so an unspotted enemy can cross right in front of you and you'll spot him so slow due to server-to-client communication speed at the time that you couldn't even react in time.
• Want to play in a 3 platoon with two buddies but none of you own a premium account? Well too bad, that's a premium feature, get fucked.
• Want to start a tank company and have a standard account? See above.
• Stock grinds and grinds in general were so much worse. No gold ammo for creds, no boosters, no x5 missions, no blueprint fragments, no top of the tree bonus xp missions, etc.
• Griefing with team damage was much more prevalent. As a sociologist I know personal experience isn't worth a dime, but as an example I know two people who owned 4 accounts which they used solely to teamkill people for fun. The 1 hour ban you get after teamkilling game after game (provided you don't balance kills and damage to enemies vs damage to allies, the ONLY factors) would expire by the time they get banned one their other alt accounts. Even though blocking and pushing out is seen today and much harder to combat, griefing is exponentially rarer today.
• I remember the missions for a free day of premium and grinding them out in highschool with my buddies. 1 day for 50,000 base experience. Base! Back when the missions were a newly introduced feature in the client.
• Sealclubbing. Low tier was much harder to play with sealclubbers. Easier to pimp out tanks, better equipment and consumables, crew, etc.

My thoughts are that the game was new, we were shittier, we had more patience. It was objectively worse and more pay to win than today. If you didn't pay real cash for gold, you couldn't even fire premium rounds or use large med kits n stuff.

There are things that the game was objectively better before about, naturally, like not having 17 different types of equipment, no tier 8 prems with armor better than tier Xs, no annoying arty stun, no BS hulldown tanks without any weakspots (rather no hulldown meta), no corridor gameplay, etc. But I am interested in your thoughts!