There were some years in the 90s and early 2ks that had good april fool's jokes, and that was what bubbled up. Not everyone did, so the novelty also made the "meh" ones seem better. By 2008ish everyone was doing one, and most of them weren't very good. By 2012ish marketing got involved and almost all of them were terrible and unfunny.

It was a nice tradition but, like many things, the scene got too big and corporate. It was a zombie tradition for a while then slowly faded away.

In fact when cloudflare started releasing serious things on 4/1, I found it to be a refreshing subversion of the trope.