I was thinking the opposite, partly because I 'contributed' to the problem I'm about to describe.
A little over a year ago was, I think, when the downhill momentum really picked up for wsb. Go back two years or so and you have a pretty rich culture in the sub. Everyone speaks the same language, everyone knows all of the jokes. Their posts make front page or get r/all views maybe once a month and those r/all viewers don't sub, they just observe and laugh and move on.
About a year ago (maybe coinciding with Corona? maybe just enough super interesting stories too close together) they reached that critical mass that kills a sub. They made r/all too much, too many people joined, lending more upvotes to reach r/all more, etc. They passed a miillion subs and that event alone got a bunch of new ones. All through here, the culture is still on display but many contributors don't entirely understand it or won't speak the language.
What you can see in there today is a highly condensed version of what you could see over a lot of last year. Memes from all over reddit are being used in place of or interchangeably in place of wsb-specific memes. wsb never really went in for emojis before, they were never apes, they weren't smooth brains; they were only ever retards or autists, that was it. The newcomers got that irreverence was part of the vibe but didn't or couldn't learn the language of that irreverence. The content most popular on wsb (graphs, position screenshots, haranguing dd posts, gifs to rival HQG) are few and far between now. Even the famous irreverence is lost, replaced by the hope of a few million people who are playing a game they don't understand.
wsb won't recover. It might move, probably to a few different places, but the original tone and specific make-up won't be duplicated anywhere. And, that's okay. It had its moment, as have many other communities on the internet over the last ~30 years. It's sad they end but they do all seem to end. No community can keep its original character past a certain amount of growth without strict and constant moderation and that was never in wsb's blueprint.
* I said I contributed to wsb's demise but not how. I've been in there for years now, across multiple accounts, but I only ever typed how I typed here. I won't call myself or others 'retard' or 'autist' and I don't go in for hyperbole very often. When wsb was small, this was fine. I was in a tiny minority of people who just spoke plainly. Today? It's too much. There aren't enough old guard to hold the line against this many newcomers.