Children have completely taken over this board.

This board used to be a decent way to exchange some ideas, even one or two years ago you could try to ignore the bad threads. 

Now it's like every thread is just nonsense, once in a blue moon there's a decent thread.   

Yes, but does Pythagorean Relativism entail Heraclitan Fluxism? 

This board was never good, if you want to squint you can call it "decent."

But, yeah it has some how managed to get worse. There use to be actual game analysis in the game analysis section.

There are still like ~10 relatively active good players who contribute on almost every good thread in the 'Openings' section, it isn't as bad as you think.

To be fair, I am surprised how much opening knowledge the younger generation have nowadays. Some of them can be a real thorn in the 1500-1800 bracket with their strong play out of the opening gates.

Also the use of engine analysis and statistics is mind boggling to me but, it’s fun when they pull up the numbers and screenshots; saves me the work and research.

End of the day, it keeps me informed with the trends. What’s nay, yay and so forth.

Slow down man, that’s a geography lesson and name dropping beyond my comprehension. That’s what I mean, what’s with the added opening knowledge?

Is everybody going to YouTube or chessables or lichess databases ? Does that even help your game?

The added opening knowledge comes from a few places. You could understand at the very least the tabiya positions and ideas of all these variations (and many more) after watching less than three hours of YouTube. Hanging Pawns puts up excellent tutorial videos showing the common positions and ideas of a lot of openings and then more in-depth videos doing the same but for a variation rather than an opening (think the Najdorf rather than the Sicilian as a whole).

However, it's more of a waste of time to know so much theory in blitz, but it's invaluable half the time in rapid, and the higher one climbs the more useful it becomes.

YouTube seems to be the most common place, followed by Chessable, followed by engine analysis. I personally never went the Chessable route (too in depth to be of any use, I just want the tabiya not the full theory) but I spent a lot of time in engine analysis at around 1050 after a blistering defeat to the Fried Liver making sure I'd have an answer the next time an Italian player came calling, and that trend helped me to make it to 1200, and then from there a gradual increase in the skill of my opponents combined with my better understanding of what moves were good and why in common openings skyrocketed me to 1600 in less than 6 months, and I'm a pretty solid 1550 most days now. 

I'd say yes, opening knowledge does really help your game, the issue is that most veteran players think of theory as theory and most newer players think of 'tabiya and a move or two afterwards in the five openings they play' as theory, so learning the tabiya and a move or two, especially in what you're most likely to see, is very useful, while actual theory is worthless until you hit like 2000.