Instead, it was packed to the rafters with Flash ads; the layout was bloated with unnecessarily large, unoptimised graphic files; and, the most prominent button to download didn't actually do that — it would take you to a page where you could select a server to download. That's your job, SourceForge, not mine.
I think that design comes from another era. All I've seen happen to it since is cutting out some of the graphics, changing the colour scheme a little, and switching to HTML ads. It's still from another era.
I would recommend that you "revisit" TFA, click the last one or two links in it, and read TFAs that those links take you to.
I've been reading since the end of last century, and I still go there regularly. It used to be the case that every day there were at least a few posts interesting posts there, that I hadn't yet read somewhere else. It kinda was my portal in the world of technology news. That's not the case anymore: the posts now are mostly not interesting (to me, at least), and mostly not exactly news anymore.
What I used to value about Slashdot were mostly the comments (much like here on Hacker News). Yes, there was lots of spam, but when reading on level 2 or 3 much of the comments did add value to the story. These days the comments have decreased very significantly, both in quantity and quality.
Slashdot really used to be much more meaty, as you say. These days I get my tech news from Ars Technica, Hacker News, LWN, and some Reddit subs.
Though if you scroll to the bottom you see the click bait type ads prevalent to the modern web