Years ago almost all researchers in CS were genuinely trying to advance the topic, they published rarely. There were hyper stars, but almost all of the community thought very carefully before publishing anything. The problem was that the internal ranking of contributors that the community had (and it was pretty clear) was opaque to outsiders and obviously biased - there were few women or people of colour and age had a lot to do with your rank. On the other hand the set up was "useful" in that most people (who were white and male) seemed to be engaged in actual and useful work, and it was pretty clear where the state of the art was and what you needed to read and grasp to understand it.
Right now many people are engaged in creating blizzards of papers, the mechanism of choice is the construction of factories for writing papers - an army of graduate students and post-docs - and the construction of communities of publication that are plausible enough to enable the extraction of funds from funding sources.
Is this "useful" well - there is still bias and discrimination; there are not enough women (where enough is proportionate to the representation of women in the general population and their desire to do this kind of thing) and there are not enough people of colour - but there are more, which, thank god, I think most people think is a good thing. Research in some parts of CS is going very fast now as well, which is great!
But, in HCI, Enterprise IT, Software Methodologies, things do not seem so good, and where things are going well, like in AI I wonder if this is coincidence (as in look, a thousand cores have arrived, I can do many things while waiting for my paper factory to make more papers).
And it is expensive, very expensive. Where-as old CS involved a crowd of poorly paid sports jacket wearers, new CS involves a horde of hoodies, but the expense that worries me is the cognitive one - how to sort through the morass of chatter that conceals (intentionally, often, so as to enable the next seven or eight six page koans of review passing flim flam) the things I need (TM).
So, some things are better in CS land. People who wouldn't have got a shout before are in with a shout (some of them)
but instead of building an inclusive community of people really trying to do research we have build a thing that I hesitate to call a community that is more inclusive but contains many people who are doing things which are not research at all, in fact, they are kinda anti-research.
And you can't get funding to do a field study, or publish a paper without waving some silly maths that means almost nothing about. And if you do publish, you'll have to cough up £2k one way or another, and no one will read the bloody thing.