I used to play YGO back in the day when Invasion of Chaos was the hottest set ever. I remember when Cyber Dragon was released it completely ruined the meta game, and honestly YGO has never been as good since. The last time I went to an SJC Tele-Dad was the deck to beat. That was the last time I played competitively.
When Pendulum Monsters were all the rage, I played my little cousin and his friend's competitive pendulum decks, against my very outdated Anti-TeleDad SJC deck and ironically crushed them, even after I adjusted my deck for their banlist. I guess anything good enough to stop TeleDad was more than enough to deal with Pendulums. My impression was that YGO was dominated by themed decks that play themselves, and there isn't as much variation and creativity in deck building as a result. It also took forever for those guys to do their turn making it a bit boring. Despite having a immense card pool that allows for all sorts of previously unplayable strategies, people are very trendy and fixated on the current meta. It's Konami's fault, because they give these themes insane support, that makes it hard to look at other strategies.
I honestly think Konami is doing too much with XYZ, Pendulum, and Link monsters, but the goat control days aren't coming back. I play Duel Links now. Konami still has a nasty habit of releasing dominant overpowered theme decks, which typically take hard to acquire Ultra Rare cards to counter, but it is more balanced than normal YGO. E-Con and Wall of Disruption are OP, as those cards honestly reward poor resource management, and I dislike how people have to play around them in order to be competitive. I've dealt with more brutal formats though, so Duel Links is pretty easy. It just takes a lot of playing to build up a deck if you're not trying to spend money.
A long time, imo I don't think it's worth after 3 major summoning meta shifts.
That's not even the half of it. This cat was playing in a format where you could have two copies of Heavy Storm, two Sangans, and two Witch of Black Forest. Delinquent Duo wasn't even out, the game was pure beatdown. The difference between that format and the 2006 format is honestly too extreme, never mind the new summoning mechanics.