This is good information, but a bit superficial - before AI, what percentage of online articles were generated from templates? What was written by content generation farms? Fiverrr and co pay-per-word writers?

I suspect that market has been more affected than anything.

I don't know, at least half of the front page seems to be LLM generated at any given time on HN. I couldn't say half seemed templated a few years ago.