Was bought out by dotdash a few years ago. Been on a steady decline ever since. The old content is still there, so it still works as a reference, but the new stuff is not of the same quality

It doesn't seem like anything happened with them, they're just published by a company that also spams seemingly hollow search results for reviews. Reviews it seems like they may not have meaningfully conducted. But serious eats isn't actually implicated in anything other than being published by them as best I can tell. Dotdash Meredith also seems to publish a bunch of other food/recipe sites too.