I never quit on WWE. They've had 30 years of ups and downs. There's a lot of praise given to the Attitude era, but the only really great full year they had was 2000; and it's been argued that Wrestlemania 2000 was the worst of the decade - but despite that, the year was fantastic. Other than 2000, there were always periods of anywhere between 3 and 8 months where the show stank. And while 2018 was far from perfect, it was still one of the better years I recall WWE ever having. So, I still have faith that no matter how crappy it gets, they can swing it around quickly.
Speaking of Wrestlemania 2000, I disagree it was a bad show, it had some phenomenal matches including the proto-TLC and the triple threat best of two falls; it was mostly that Triple H beat the Rock when it was the Rock's time to win. It's also in retrospect when taking the event out of the context of what had gone on over the last few months - WWE had never built so many strong stars all at once and they wanted to fit them all into matches; so singles matches ended up not really being a thing.
Anyway, I feel a contextualizing rant coming on, here it goes:
Also, while a great many people might remember the Ministry angle and Ministry Undertaker as being something fantastic, at the time it was not really that well received; also, I think it's more the idea of it, and not the actual execution. The actual execution was incredibly cheesy, but on top of that it was slow. The Corporation was the more interesting angle, more specifically it was the Rock and Triple H. Until the Corporate Ministry and Shane's takeover, that wasn't that great.... The ECW/WCW Invasion Angle was often viewed as a bad time for WWE, but it was still a lot better than the Corporate Ministry. Anyway, watching 1999 is fairly hard, especially after the introduction of Smackdown and they diluted their programming further, Austin was barely active in the year, Rock and crazy Foley were the two shining stars, and after that probably the younger tag stars who weren't getting nearly enough time. Most stuff happening seemed like it was aimed at an ADHD shock value audience, there was no depth to the writing, and the dialogue was terrible.
Then poof! Like magic, toward the end of 1999 and early 2000 WWE took all those crappy random storylines, and rather than scrapping them, they weaved them all into well written coherent plots. Then in a matter of months they took a roster of a few stars + jobbers, and turned it into a roster of megastars. Foley and Austin were arguably the biggest, with Rock having the most buzz, but Foley put both Rock and Triple H over HUGE, and by the end of 1999 Triple H had become the greatest heel in WWE history, cementing that status through early 2000 in his feud with Foley; and Rock by being the Foley replacement took his sky-high status and saw it launched into the stratosphere. At the same time, the new acquisitions (Jericho and Angle) who were floundering through 1999 became giant success stories in early 2000, they brought in 4 new guys (the Radicalz ) and they became mega stars too, the tag division skyrocketed (especially E&C, The Hardyz, and the Dudleyz), even the hardcore/24/7 division was huge.
The only one people seemed to not be able to get behind was Xpac, I think it was the storyline where he cucked Kane with Tori, and the crowd simply could never forgive him.
But anyway, if WWE hadn't become really good very suddenly, the audience would have likely collapsed sooner than it did, and harder. Things might not necessarily have been bad, either. I think ECW would have picked up most of the fanbase since WCW was considered a joke at the time, but ECW had red hot buzz, just no one made the effort to watch it - only talk about it - because WWE was already the "It" show.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
