I fear this kind of thing is going to become more and more common. A lot of the early web was created by people who are dying, retiring, or burnt out by running community sites (especially in the AI spam era) and the siren song of cashing out is always right there.
They don’t even have to cash out. The minute they stop renewing their domains this becomes a possibility.
Reminds me of a recent thing when PCgamer.com replaced Disqus with its own native comment system and wiped thousands of comments from their website.
TLDR: Old owner sold the site & the new owner turned it into garbage.