There is indeed quite a shift towards just posting articles. A lot of people don’t regularly post (at least it was like that on Reddit), and for those people, the articles are great.
It is hard to keep conversations active in smaller communities. As people will quickly stop posting new chats and questions if there are no replies.
I also started using Lemmy during the Reddit fallout, and stayed for a few weeks. After that I started seeing less posts that interested me, and I took a break from Lemmy for a while. And finally returned a week ago.
Even on Reddit I see less interesting posts now. Especially the amount of discussion posts also seems to be lower there now. The official Reddit app is also a lot better for reading than for writing.