Is it just me, or has dnd beyond gone from interesting stuff like encounter of the week, guides, class 101s, and how to dm monsters, to simply promoting the latest book. Its honestly disappointing.

it seems that most of the old writers left around the same period of time. I wonder what happened?

DDB ran a series of feedback questionnaires a while back asking people's opinions of their website article content.  From what the discussion threads at the time were saying (an admittedly skewed source, but the best information I have), the overall response was "meh".  The content was generally considered too basic, too anemic, or too mercantile overall, with one great example actually being the website changing Encounter of the Week from cool standalone encounters you could drop in wherever you needed to "Here's a miniseries mini-adventure leading up to our latest book release".

I actually prefer what they've been putting out since then.  I don't always read it, but when I do I find it more interesting/useful than a lot of previous takes which assume everyone reading it is absolutely brand spankin'-ass new to D&D.  I do miss Dan Telfer, though.  That's one thing I really do hate this website's userbase for - chasing Dan off for "making fun" of D&D.  Not everything Dan wrote landed, but the stuff that did work was pure golden glory.

Oh, I miss Dan...

I must disagree, but appreciate the information. I DO agree about dan though. I particularly liked the article about the corpse full of strange trinkets and such, and actually included it in my campaign.

That bag full of petrified rats was pure genius, and I absolutely am throwing it in my campaign.

The Corpse of Infinite Red Herrings is exactly the sort of galaxy-brain GMing advice I want from my DDB website articles.  I can Class-101 my players my own damn self, but that couple of articles was just chef's-kiss perfect.

The comedy and D&D stuff was hilarious, and class 101 was sheer excellence, the crap they put out these days I barely bother skimming through, man, I miss James Haeck’s stuff.....

Anyway, the things about introducing you to a setting is useful for novice DMs as well as guys who set all their adventures in Waterdeep and don’t have time to read through hundreds of pages worth of lore, but those articles never really appealed to me, class 101’s were fun, informative, and witty, everyone else who’s writing for DDB these days is just trying their darnedest to sound like JH and failing miserably, but that’s just my short-but-sweet rant.

I have been noticing the same thing myself, I miss the articles. Class 101 was very helpful, and James's stuff was great. I loved that we got a little story before some of the articles. The new stuff is just just incredibly dull. It used to feel like we got a lot for our membership, not so much now. New content is added in dribbles. Maybe once a week,  twice if we are lucky. It isnt the DND Beyond I signed up for.

I didn't sign up for the articles, I signed up for the tools and the sources.  I enjoyed the ideas behind James Haeck's writing, but the lack of proofreading in his stuff and the obvious use of boilerplate text in many of his series (especially the 101 series) drove me batty.   I never used any of the Encounter of the Week ideas--at first mostly because I wasn't DMing at all when they first appeared (thanks to a move and COVID), and then because they were tied to published adventures I wasn't running even if I was able to DM a game.  I should go back and look at some of the ones from before the "promote the next book" ones.  That said, if was running those adventures, I would have found the related encounters helpful.  

Dan's humor was absolutely not to my taste, and after realizing that I routinely ignored his articles.  I realize that taste in humor varies, and I knew lots of folks here appreciated him, so I never really objected to his hiring or his work. The thing that annoyed me most about his articles was that for a week or two  (maybe more?) the ONLY new articles on the site were ones by him; I would have been much happier if there had a been a mix of authors and tones, and if his articles had been stretched out over a longer period of time, as one of several options.

Recently it has seemed like they have often provided written articles that connect to some of their streaming/video content.  I've appreciated that approach, as aside from the Developer's update, I don't have/take time to watch the videos.  I haven't actually read many of those articles because Ravenloft/horror doesn't interest me, and that's (understandably) been much of the recent focus.  When the feywild related content picks up, I'll be reading more of the articles.